On May 15th and 16th, together with innovative finance partner Agriwallet, 2SCALE visited IFC's Global Agribusiness Conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The main focus of the conference was to share experiences and expertise on introducing innovations that can improve access to finance in smallholder supply chains. A group of over 150 participants from banks, investors, private companies, government, NGO's and farmer organizations came together to share exciting examples.
During the conference, 2SCALE shared its experience on facilitating access to finance for the smallholder farmers, producer groups and SMEs involved in the 2SCALE program. One of the innovative examples of this can be found in Kenya, where 2SCALE currently collaborates with AgriWallet, a company based in Kenya, that provides innovative mobile accounts that allows farmers to save, borrow and pay for their farming activities. We're currently introducing AgriWallet to farmers in several partnerships in Kenya, to allow farmers an easy and accessible solution to start saving from their earnings from farming activities, to ensure they have sufficient access to own resources when they are in need for working capital. So far, over 1500 farmers have already signed up.
The conference also provided an excellent opportunity to launch 2SCALE's newest thematic paper on Access to Finance, where we bundled all the expertise and experience we generated over the past 5 years on the work we've been doing on brokering access to finance for farmers and SMEs. The paper can be found in our resources section, and can be directly accessed here