Agricultural financing in Mali

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The Mali Agricultural Financing project aims to improve and expand access to target group-oriented financial services for small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises (SMEs) along the various agricultural value chains throughout Mali. The project thus contributes to improving agricultural productivity and thus to food security, to creating and securing income and jobs, and to deepening and broadening the financial system. In the long term, this can make a contribution to reducing poverty. The second phase of the FC project is about gearing the BNDA's business more towards promoting smaller enterprises (MSMEs) in the agricultural sector. For this, the BNDA needs a long-term loan (subordinated loan) through which loans to agricultural MSMEs are to be refinanced. The relevance here has increased further compared to Phase 1 due to the global corona pandemic. The BNDA currently has a very high refinancing requirement for its long-term lending business, which is to be covered with around EUR 14.6 million from the FC-SEWOH measure. The BNDA also needs long-term personnel support to implement a new MSME strategy. An SBF-funded consulting company has already been commissioned to develop this MSME strategy. The objective here is clearly to better align the BNDA with smaller agricultural MSMEs, including through digitization, new financing products or financing partners. In particular, the potential for promoting agroecological approaches should be explored and suggestions made for the BNDA to promote companies that work in an agroecological manner. It should also be examined how the MyAgro target group can be served with formal BNDA services. The BNDA also needs personnel support and a subsidy for software and hardware to implement its digitization strategy. The FZ-SEWOH measure is to contribute up to EUR 1.7 million to support the implementation of the MSME and digitization strategies.