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Author: e-MFP
2019 marks ten editions of the European Microfinance Award and to celebrate, e-MFP has decided to reach out to the previous winners, for a ‘where are they now?’ blog series, published throughout 2019, to look at what they have been doing with their initiative since they won, and how the winning of the Award has helped, and what plans they have in store. In 2010, the theme of the Award was 'Value Chain Finance', focusing on stimulating and promoting inclusive financial schemes that contribute to the evolution of value chains in developing countries. A value chain is a vertical alliance between different independent enterprises, collaborating to achieve a more rewarding position in the market. Harbu of Ethiopia won for its initiative to finance the soy bean value chain as a response to market demand generated by a shortage of cow milk in Jimma city, in Oromia state. The initiative sought to strengthen horizontal linkages with farmer marketing organisations and vertical linkages with retailers and women's associations that are processing and producing soy milk. The initiative created market opportunities for producer-farmers and employment opportunities for urban women and youth. At the same time, it improved families’ nutrition, especially for children and women. Harbu provided financial services to most of the actors across the value chain, from the individual producers all the way to retailers.

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Author: Dirk Lebe - Swisscontact
A lack of data is a significant bottleneck for financial institutions and development organizations. The same is true for knowledge about a targeted sector, especially when working in agriculture and agri-finance. Swisscontact’s Sustainable Cocoa Production Program (SCPP) in Indonesia, aiming to assist 130,000 cocoa farmers by 2020, tackles those two topics through training financial institutions about the cocoa sector and cocoa financials and shedding light on the financial situation and perception of cocoa farmers. Through an advanced program management database, SCPP is able to identify critical and interesting data relations. Baseline data of 17,429 farmers and first conclusions were compiled into a baseline report. This blog post highlights some findings from the report. One of the most important outcomes of our data analysis is the categorization of farmers into professional, progressing and unprofessional categories, and subcategorizing them into small, medium and large in terms of farm size. This leads to different approaches in targeting farmers, especially in the sense of formal Access to Finance (A2F).