NextBillion - A WDI Publication

Silos and fragmentation have slowed progress in inclusive finance for too long, though not for lack of commitment or creativity. Across the sector, private actors pursue market-based solutions, public institutions mobilize development finance, and philanthropy funds innovation. Inside organizations, product teams push new offerings, operations prioritize efficient service delivery, and dealmakers work to keep pipelines flowing.

Each of these roles is necessary, and together they reflect a sector that is engaged and serious about progress. Yet when their efforts are not intentionally aligned, essential components of inclusive finance — capital, product design, data and market access — fail to reinforce each other. Pilots stall before they can scale, risks accumulate rather than being absorbed across partners, and communities remain exposed to shocks that a coordinated response could help mitigate.

The Barriers to Multi-Stakeholder Alignment Are Real

Many of the systems underpinning inclusive finance were not built for multi-stakeholder alignment. Institutional partners often operate under different mandates, timelines and risk tolerances, shaped by their own internal priorities and performance frameworks. Even when organizations pursue the same goal, coordinating efforts can be a challenge.

These structural constraints hinder innovation and weaken responsiveness. When capital is tied to institution-specific KPIs and budget cycles, when data and insights aren’t shared broadly, and when partnerships are defined around narrow roles rather than shared results, even the best-intentioned initiatives struggle to gain momentum.

Silos also limit visibility into what is happening beyond individual functions. A funding decision may make sense inside a single organization, or a product may perform against internal metrics, even as barriers elsewhere in the value chain quietly erode results. This makes it harder to pinpoint where bottlenecks are occurring, why impact fails to materialize or how resources could be redirected more effectively.

FINCA and FLUID: A Case Study in Collaborative Innovation

FINCA’s partnership with FLUID responds directly to these barriers, providing an example of how incentives, learning and execution can be aligned to overcome organizational silos.

FLUID is a fintech startup that works to increase income and economic resilience for farmers in Africa, by providing customized input packages that boost yields, while ensuring fair market access. Its model combines technology, data and infrastructure to bridge the gap between traditional finance and agricultural communities. Our collaboration grew out of an early catalytic investment in FLUID by FINCA’s impact investing arm, FINCA Ventures, which supported FLUID’s early-stage growth and sparked a chain reaction across FINCA’s broader teams and networks.

The groundwork for this collaboration had been laid by FINCA’s Poverty Eradication Lab team, which was applying research and human-centered product design to explore how to ease African farmers’ cash-flow constraints and risk exposure. That work pointed to the need for a more holistic, in‑kind financing approach that combined inputs, services and market access. The initial investment in FLUID reflected that need, leading to a successful joint pilot that generated a financing model that is now creating value for farmers and investors alike, while also establishing the conditions for closer collaboration between our two organizations.

As our respective efforts converged, the relationship shifted beyond a traditional investor‑company dynamic. FLUID’s technology and commercial networks access gave FINCA’s Poverty Eradication Lab an opportunity to test the products it was developing under real-world conditions, and our pilot program leveraged each organization’s strengths to co-develop an integrated financing offering for rice farmers in Ghana. Instead of conventional cash loans, participants would receive an in-kind package of inputs, mechanization services, agronomic training and guaranteed market access, with repayment for these services and inputs tied to their harvested produce.

FLUID’s platform provided the digital backbone — capturing granular data, supporting credit assessment for in-kind financing and enabling real-time adjustments — while its teams handled delivery. FINCA’s Poverty Eradication Lab funded the pilot and the associated learning needed to test the model in practice. At the same time, FINCA and FLUID’s combined teams explored ways to engage our respective strategic partners across the financial inclusion ecosystem to support and expand this work.

Alignment Built for Pressure, Not Perfection

On the ground, the FINCA-FLUID integrated financing approach is already demonstrating how combining finance, inputs, services and market access can reduce risk in smallholder agriculture by tackling volatility at its source rather than after losses occur. In northern Ghana, 77 farmers joined the initial pilot last year, achieving 23% higher yields, income gains of up to 140% and 95% repayment at the end of the harvest cycle.

Encouraged by strong first-season results, FINCA and FLUID expanded the model into a second season, increasing participation, acreage, and engagement from women and youth. Yet a sharp drop in rice prices, driven by currency movements and weaker demand for local production, reduced farmer incomes and revealed a critical vulnerability at the point of sale.

In the second season, 63% of participating farmers saw weaker outcomes, and only 32% earned positive net income after repaying all costs, although average net profits would have remained positive under first-season pricing conditions. Despite this, farmer participation remained high, with participants still earning average incomes more than 30% higher than those of farmers outside the program.

Rather than undermining the model, this stress test clarified where the system needed to be improved. By combining financing, delivery and data into a single effort, FINCA and FLUID were able to adjust the pilot by strengthening off-taker arrangements, refining the product design and increasing resilience to future shocks.

The lesson is straightforward: Even well-designed products are tested by forces beyond any one organization’s control. The real test of collaborative innovation is not whether the initial plans hold, but whether partnerships are built to learn, adapt and improve under real-world conditions.

What It Takes to Make Synergy Work 

Beyond confirming the viability of an integrated approach to agricultural finance, the FINCA-FLUID pilot points to broader insights about tackling complex challenges that apply far beyond agriculture and our two organizations.

Even when stronger coalitions emerge, collaboration without the right tools and financial infrastructure can only go so far. Many inclusive finance providers have been slow to move past conventional lending models built around static credit assessment, rigid repayment schedules and limited use of real-time data — a framework for managing risk that has changed little over the decades. These approaches do not reflect the irregular cash flows, production risks or market volatility that low-income entrepreneurs navigate every day. The people inclusive finance seeks to serve are resourceful and entrepreneurial, and providers must match their ingenuity with similarly innovative financial tools.

However, agile product design is only part of the equation. Across emerging markets, the providers serving low-income populations depend on capital that is scarce, expensive and poorly matched to their operating realities. Under these conditions, sustaining affordable finance is difficult, regardless of product quality. Addressing this challenge will require providers, investors and partners to rethink how capital is sourced and structured, introducing greater flexibility and risk-sharing.

Finally, better outcomes depend on internal alignment, because fragmented organizations cannot build cohesive partnerships. Organizations must treat data as connective tissue, making it easier to adapt quickly and manage risk collectively. As collaborative partnerships build trust and iterate, they must prioritize transparency and shared decision-making, creating space to surface mistakes and learn from them collectively.

Inclusive finance will not achieve its goals through isolated efforts. The barriers are systemic, and they demand systemic solutions. The foundation for these solutions is there. What comes next depends on how boldly and collaboratively we choose to build.

Seth Spiro is Chief Product Officer at FINCA; Moustapha Seck is the Founder and CEO of FLUID.

Photo credit: Sashkinw