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Swedfund Invests $10 Million to Support MSME Lending in East and Southern Africa
Swedfund, Sweden’s development finance institution, has signed a USD 10 million loan to Platcorp Holdings Limited to support lending to micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Measuring Systems Change in Agricultural Finance in Africa: Practical Metrics and Guidance for Detecting and Tracking Real Change
Despite employing 65-70% of the region's population and contributing 20-40% of national GDPs, Africa's agriculture sector receives less than 3% of its overall commercial credit — and in some countries, that share hasn't changed for decades. But according to Carla Legros, a consultant and strategist in agricultural and inclusive finance, that doesn't necessarily mean that progress has stalled. She proposes a set of metrics for assessing whether systems change is actually happening in the continent's agricultural finance sector.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Finance
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Brazil’s Neon Raises $129 Million in Series E Extension Round
Founded in 2016, Neon provides digital accounts, credit cards, personal loans, and investment products to customers in Brazil.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Latin America
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From COVID to Foreign Aid Cuts: How Community-Led Financial Access Can Help Women and Their Communities Weather Crises
The COVID pandemic had a substantial impact on women’s financial access in many emerging economies — an impact that persists to this day. Now, as Kathy Guis at Kiva explains, a new crisis is building, as foreign aid cuts and broader macroeconomic uncertainty reduce funding to financial service providers focused on women’s inclusion. She argues that despite the urgency of other global issues, access to financial services matters, and explores how Kiva hopes to grow its support for women and other vulnerable populations despite the challenging funding environment.
- Categories
- Finance
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Paymenow Bags $22.4 Million to Expand On-Demand Salary Services Across Africa
The funding, structured under a sustainable finance format, is one of the largest institutional bets to date on the earned wages access (EWA) model in the region.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- financial inclusion, fintech, lending, scale, startups
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Bfree Attracts $3 Million in Fresh Funding from Verdant Capital Hybrid Fund
The investment will support Bfree’s distressed loan portfolio financing in Africa, thereby improving the credit scores of the distressed borrowers, enabling them the access to credit from financial institutions in the future.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Press Release: 60 Decibels Study Finds Loans to Savings Groups Contribute to Stronger Financial Resilience in Africa
Through VisionFund’s Finance Accelerating Savings Group Transformation (FAST) programme, the study has demonstrated that access to capital combined with financial education can help businesses grow.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Google Drives AI to Boost Agriculture, Enrich Cultural Data in India
Google unveiled its new Agricultural Monitoring & Event Detection API, offering field‑level crop insights updated fortnightly, and launched the Amplify Initiative to build hyperlocal datasets across Indic languages.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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