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Direct-to-Farmer Finance: Business models for serving the hardest-to-reach smallholders
An estimated 90 percent of smallholder farmers lack strong relationships with buyers, limiting their access to finance, inputs, training and other support. And it’s difficult for financial providers to reach them. That’s why direct-to-farmer finance is so important, says Dalberg’s Laura Goldman. She discusses a new briefing on the approach from the Initiative for Smallholder Finance.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education
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Watch the Replay of our Google Hangout with William Warshauer, TechnoServe’s New President & CEO
TechnoServe is an organization at the center of food security, farmer incomes and environmental sustainability. You’ve heard a lot from TechnoServe experts here on NextBillion, including a post just last week about outgrower farming models. So we’re glad to have the opportunity to host TechnoServe’s new president and CEO Will Warshauer, who has agreed to join us for our next Google Hangout here at NextBillion.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Case Study : ‘Digging in’ or ‘building out’ to benefit farmers and buyers in outgrower schemes?
What can we learn from growing tobacco? Although TechnoServe does not work with the crop, nor do we intend to, it turns out there’s a lot we can glean from the successes of tobacco outgrower schemes.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Outgrower Schemes: A pathway to sustainable agriculture
Outgrower schemes, which link networks of unorganized smallholder farmers with domestic and international buyers, have demonstrated win-win potential – but don’t always live up to it. TechnoServe, in Part 1 of a two-part series, details its investigation into the features of effective and sustainable outgrower models.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education
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What’s Holding Agricultural Finance Back?: The MIX describes what’s needed to help this crucial sector grow
One of the most effective ways to reduce poverty is to increase agricultural productivity. But for many farmers, access to yield-increasing technologies and inputs requires access to financial products specially tailored to their needs, which are scarce in rural areas. Xavier Martin Palomas of the MIX discusses this challenge and how financial service providers and policymakers can address it.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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NexThought Monday – Between the CEO and the BoP: Root Capital report focuses on the often overlooked role of women as “middle managers”
Root Capital CEO Willy Foote says the impact investment firm realized that most approaches to women’s economic empowerment have focused on the opposite ends of the economic spectrum: business leaders and entrepreneurs on one side, and women workers at the BoP on the other. But what about women who are not CEOs or entrepreneurs but who hold positions critical to the success of the enterprise?
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Nexthought Monday – Fertilizer as Both Friend AND Foe: How to use them more responsibly, effectively and for farmers – profitably
More than 100 million tons of fertilizers are applied worldwide each year, supplying our planet with plentiful harvests. But that’s only part of the story. At Semilla Nueva, we have a lot of interest in how fertilizers can be used responsibly and sustainably to feed our growing planet and boost farmers’ incomes in the process.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
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Three Steps to Jumpstart Agriculture Mobile Payments: Step 3 – Overcoming farmers’ illiteracy, financial illiteracy and lack of trust
In the third and final post in his series on embedding mobile payments by large buyers to farmers into agricultural value chains, Lee Babcock considers the need to overcome farmers’ illiteracy, financial illiteracy and, perhaps most importantly, lack of trust.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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