The Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance releases ‘State of the Sector’ report

CSAF convenes 12 of the world's leading agricultural lenders, including Oikocredit, to exchange ideas, identify best practices, and develop industry standards. Its members aim to create a thriving, sustainable, and transparent market to serve the financing needs of agricultural small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in low- and middle-income countries.

In 2017, CSAF members issued loans totalling $716 million to 794 businesses. These loans connected 2.2 million smallholder farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to local and international markets. CSAF’s State of the Sector report was developed in partnership with MIX with support from the Small Foundation.

Read the report or view the annual State of the Sector webinar to learn more about the evolving credit market for agricultural SMEs, such as:

• Growth and risk trends for agricultural SME lending 
• Constraints to market growth and strategies for unlocking impact
• CSAF’s collaboration with MIX to develop an online and publicly accessible platform where users can track trends and create customised reports on annual lending activity in the agricultural SME finance market, expected to launch in early 2019.

Together with the State of the Sector report, CSAF also launched a first-of-its-kind financial benchmarking study which provides insights into the financial performance of agricultural SME lending. The benchmarking study, conducted by Dalberg Advisors with support from USAID, analyses loan-level data for 3,500+ loans totalling over $2.3 billion made by nine CSAF members between 2010 and 2016.

Read the report or view the webinar
Read the financial benchmarking study