People in the agriculture sector across Africa are in luck, as they are to experience adequate financial supports and availability and appropriate use of fertiliser on the continent.
The African Development Bank (AfDB) says its Africa Fertiliser Financing Mechanism (AFFM) strategic plan 2022-2028 is committed to mobilising funds to support Agriculture.
The move is apt, especially at a time when Small Holder Farmers (SHFs) are grappling with the high cost of farm inputs as a result of the unending Russia-Ukraine conflict.
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The AFFM strategic plan 2022- 2028 prioritises broadening access to finance through capital investments and policy reforms where technical assistance will also be provided to boost smallholder farmers’ access and appropriate fertiliser.
This was the crux of the meeting when 11 institutional members of the AFFM’s governing council participated in a hybrid meeting hosted at the bank’s headquarters in Abidjan.
They were the African Union Commission, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the International Fertiliser Development Center, the African Export and Import Bank and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.
Also in attendance are representatives of the International Fertiliser Association, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, the Pan African Farmers Organisation, Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Agriculture, the AfDB and the AFFM Secretariat.
The council members, however, congratulated the AFFM for successfully delivering trade credit guarantee projects in Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.
The AfDB’s Vice President for Agriculture, Human and Social Development, Beth Dunford, said that the AFFM is one of the important vehicles for achieving the Bank’s Feed Africa Strategy objectives.
“It is no surprise that AFFM has been instrumental in supporting the implementation of the bank’s African Emergency Food Production Facility.
“I’m proud to say that the bank has mobilised our agriculture expertise to roll out facility programs in 24 African countries,” Dunford said.
Through the end of 2022, trade credit guarantees totaling $8.8 million provided 5.3 times leverage.
Interestingly, this enabled the provision of 112,268 tonnes of fertiliser to 690,896 smallholder farmers in the four countries.
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Under these projects, 97 small and medium enterprises gained access to finance, and 138 companies, including fertiliser suppliers, hub-agro dealers and aggregators, and 20,987 smallholder farmers, benefited from capacity building
To scale up its trade credit guarantee investments, the AFFM has developed a pipeline of projects for implementation in 2023.
These will be rolled out in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.
The council has endorsed the AFFM annual report for 2022 and the work programme and budget for 2023.
