Financing Smallholder Farmers in the Digital Age: Lessons Across Africa

There are 570 million smallholder farmer households in the world. Of these smallholder farmer households, 270 million remain financially excluded. In Sub-Saharan Africa, only about 10 percent of banks provide financing to smallholder farmers. In attempting to answer the question of why the supply for financing is very low in Sub-Saharan Africa, this brief provides an overview of the capacity, operational and product-related lessons learned by MicroSave in supporting financial service providers in Africa.