After decades of interventions, schemes, and grants, actors across Nigeriaโs agricultural value chain should have a clear understanding of what viable agricultural finance truly means. It means outcomes that meet the expectations of all participants in a given transaction: farmers, financiers, processors, and markets.
Strong risk-sharing frameworks significantly improve the chances of such mutually beneficial outcomes. Equally important are complementary systems such as capacity development, reliable farm-level data, effective monitoring, and aggregation mechanisms.
Without these, even the most substantial capital injections will struggle to deliver lasting results. In many cases, funds become depleted and the programme itself fails to sustain momentum over time. Post-mortems follow, still focusing on the money and not on the faulty or absent systems.
This is why conversations around agriculture finance must increasingly shift from the volume of credit deployed to the quality of the systems that support that credit and the actors that utilize it. Once the systems are right, finance would go after value.
Working at the intersection of finance and agriculture, NIRSAL recognises this reality, which is why much of our work is focused on strengthening systems by designing credit guarantee-backed financing frameworks, sourcing and promoting AgriTech solutions, facilitating capacity development programmes and more, which give both financiers and farmers greater confidence to engage.
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