Blogs

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).

For its annual meeting in Luxembourg this year, CGAP asked e-MFP to organize a session for its members. This was our first opportunity to present some of the lessons being highlighted by the 7th European Microfinance Award “Microfinance and Access to Education”, especially the role that donors and investors can play to support the efforts of MFIs to promote access to quality education at the bottom of the pyramid.

Evidence continues to point towards financial inclusion’s role in helping people move out of poverty, reducing income inequality, and facilitating macroeconomic growth. It will be critical to helping the global community achieve the goal of eradicating poverty by 2030, especially as we strive to reach the places and people where it is most entrenched and the hardest to fight – such as in rural agricultural communities.

Each year, e-MFP launches the European Microfinance Award, in conjunction with the Luxembourg Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and the Inclusive Finance Network Luxembourg (InFiNe.lu). The Award invites applications from financial institutions that are innovating, exploring and testing new ideas, that go beyond their core financial services, and exemplify the evolution of the microfinance sector beyond boilerplate microenterprise credit.

This blog is a republication of a post from the MimosaIndex.org website. 

Since publishing the first MIMOSA report – on Cambodia – I’ve heard one persistent critique.  We say that the market is saturated, yet none of the current indicators appear to support it: repayments are great, there’s no field evidence of widespread overindebtedness, and the major MFIs are all undergoing a process of Smart Certification. How can we assert that Cambodia is at risk of overindebtedness, let alone a credit crisis, when no other indicators seem to support it?