Smallholder Farmers, cutting across 30 states of the country, stand to benefit from the $100m micro loans, as Cellulant, an award-winning mobile commerce company, has arranged the consortium of financial sector actors who have agreed to deploy a loan book portfolio to assist farmers.
With the arrangement, 1,736,445 farmers will be getting the loan facility between June 2017 to July 2018.
This disclosure forms part of a report launched by cellulant, highlighting the impact of technology in transforming agriculture across Africa, particularly with the Growth Enhancement Support Scheme (GES) Dry Season, 2016. The report highlights key progress on food security and financial inclusion for farmers across 30 states.
The programme, which set out to service 500,000 farmer-households in four value chains, accomplished 92 per cent of the targeted subsidised service, but as a result on-boarded an additional 200,000 farmers into a financial support platform. 400 Agribusinesses and more than 1,000 jobs were created as a result of the programme.
The report, which highlighted the effects of technology on agriculture, as well as, projections for the industry, reveals that since 2011, through the use of technology, government has been able to eliminate corruption, promote transparency and transform the Agricultural sector.
“In Nigeria, where there is a clear disconnect between Broad Street (Financial sector) and Main Street (our inner cities and rural areas), interventions like GES become very important when it comes to the creation of real growth in the economy. With the dry season programme impacting more than 350,000 farmers, enough food will be produced to feed roughly 120m Nigerians for two months.
“This transformation was made possible by the Agrikore platform also known as the “e-wallet” platform. Agrikore was developed by Cellulant for Nigeria in 2012. The Agrikore platform at its core provides the tools for the creation of a structured agribusiness economy (agriconomy).”