AeAN preps up small-scale farmers in Niger Delta to access CBN’s N2bn AGSMEIS funding
Inherent challenges blight success rate
THE ABILITY OF SMALLSCALE agriculturists operating across different parts of the country to join an entrepreneurial ecosystem driven by the Agric Entrepreneurs Association-Nigeria (AeAN), which is pushing for access to a N2 billion fund the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is floating to promote agribusiness in the country, can galvanise Nigeria’s agriculture into a thriving sector.
Latest surveys show that agricultural sector’s contribution to the country’s gross domestic products (GDP) had been heading southward.
Recently, the CBN floated N2 billion package of financing to be given out as soft loans at 5%-7% interest to particularly small-scale farmers across the country.
Disbursement of the fund, known as Agribusiness Small & Medium Enterprises Investment Scheme (AGSMEIS) is through the deposit money banks (DMBs), supervised by the Bankers Committee as stakeholders and the Deposit Finance office of the CBN.
In the same vein, the CBN accredited some Entrepreneurship Development Institutes (EDIs) to train, mentor, recommend and guarantee farmers to access the AGSMEIS loans. A farmer can access up to N10 million from the fund.However, investigations show that there are deep inherent challenges within the system that have tended to blight its success rate so far. There exist huge gaps between the scheme and the farmers/small businesses.
For instance, majority of the farmers are extremely ignorant of the existence of the fund. Most of them are illiterate and cannot read and write, let alone come up with a winning business plan they are expected to write before accessing the loans; they are equally unbanked; while their farming is largely at subsistence level that they hardly understand how to turn it into a business venture.
Last week, the Agric Entrepre- neurs Association-Nigeria (AeAN), one of the EDIs recently accredited by the CBN, set out to train hundreds of farmers and small-scale business people from states around the Niger Delta region, with Rivers sending the largest number of delegates.
They gathered for three days at the sprawling School-to-Land centre, Rumuodomanya, Port Harcourt, where they went through rigorous 13 specialised modules by partners and consultants – on how to take their ventures to a business level.
Dennis Epele, chairman, board of trustees and chief operating officer of AeAN told business a.m. that they trained the farmers/small business people on ‘mindset reorientation, smart business scaling, business modelling (branding), writing bankable business plan (under simplified business plan and business plan canvas) and strategies in succeeding (sort of idea-to-action).
Epele acknowledged that funding gaps are wide, and severely challenge the success of the scheme. Accessing the AGSMEIS money only comes through a bankable business plan, which the farmers are hard-put to come up with.
He urged the CBN and the federal government, to step up the processes of access to funding.
“The CBN and federal government can identify more EDIs (entrepreneurship development institutes) like us, AeAN.
They should also help EDIs like us through funding, to carry out monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of how the farmers/small businesses are implementing the AGSMEIS fund,” he said.
The AeAN chief operating officer also called on the federal government and CBN to help procure processing plants to process farm produce into finished or semi-finished products – the lack of which is the main reason for heavy post-harvest losses, put at over N2.7 trillion, and responsible for more than 50% of farm produce.
The farmers and small businesses that emerged from the AeAN enterprise investment training scheme would write their business plans, get profiled and wait for recommendation and guarantee by AeAN before accessing the CBN N2 billion AGSMEIS fund.
In the same vein, the CBN accredited some Entrepreneurship Development Institutes (EDIs) to train, mentor, recommend and guarantee farmers to access the AGSMEIS loans