Speakers at the Clinic Session.
The Smallholder and Agri-SME Finance and Investment Network (SAFIN) is a partnership of actors that are committed to aligning their efforts to scale up access to financial services for agri-SMEs and for small commercial farms. With different tools and entry points, the members of the network work to bridge the investment gap in agriculture and food systems by financially empowering agri-SME and smallholder investors.
The 3rd Annual Plenary meeting of the SAFIN Network was held in New Delhi on November 10 and 11. The meeting consisted of presentations (blended finance and investment prospectus process), Partner Pitch Sessions and Clinic Sessions. The Clinic sessions were to pool partners' peer knowledge and support around new initiatives or products under design or early implementation. This year’s sessions featured the Global Cooperative Impact (GCI) Fund supported by the ICA and a Technical Assistance Facility under development at AgDevCo.
The GCI Fund is designed to support cooperatives by providing funding for their long-term needs and building their capacity in financial management, business planning and impact measurement. The GCI Fund is an answer to a pressing need: while cooperatives foster stability and progress in developing countries, they have a hard time attracting funds to grow or get access to loans. This new Fund will answer those needs by providing finance to fund long-term needs and sustain cooperative development. ICA is currently fundraising for the Fund.
The GCI Fund plans to measure its impact through a specific developed tool. The monitoring process will be based on a matrix of user-friendly indicators agreed with beneficiaries at the time of application. The Clinic Session was to look at Impact Assessment tailored to the cooperatives’ special needs, forms and capacities. Specifically to clinic was to focus on the following questions: Ways to fund activity and how it can be structured into the Fund? Impact assessment tools the GCI could use that are tailored to the cooperative sector? Define a social performance measuring tool that is not too complicated for our investees who will have limited capacities? Assessment tool could measure the contribution of cooperatives towards SDGs?
The Clinic Session was owned by Balasubramanian (Balu) Iyer, Regional Director of ICA Asia-Pacific facilitated by Samuel Ssenyimba of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The session was attended by among others, representatives from AFD, Coconut Industry Board (Jamaica), EU Delegation Delhi, Fundacian Capital, IFAD, ISF Advisors, Mastercard Foundation, and Small Foundation. The response to the GCI Fund was positive as the participants felt it would provide an avenue for cooperatives to get new funding. The participants discussed the rationale and possible pitfalls of targeting cooperatives, their evolving roles as financial intermediaries in new market landscapes with new data sources and value chain finance arrangements and value addition from intermediation, and the extent to which assessing fund impact on cooperatives may yield substantive information about impact on small farmers. There were examples discussed from Sub-Saharan Africa (where an Uniform Code of Cooperatives exists to take account for –accountability, finance, governance) and the Caribbean. The challenges discussed were overcoming perception, government support double-edged when it came to cooperatives, governance structures and member involvement, regulatory environment, and interest of investors to invest directly in cooperatives.
