XXX Rebuilding West Africa’s food potential
to credit for staple food production is either unavailable or comes at prohibitive interest rates. Unlocking
credit and finance constraints remains a huge challenge for agrifood chain development. At the Making
Finance Work for Africa (MFW4A) Conference, held in Kampala Uganda in 2011, a declaration of
principles was made on enhancing financial capability in Africa. The Kampala principles provide some
useful guidelines in the search for solutions. Some of the relevant principles seek to: (i) ensure legislation to
remove barriers to financing agriculture operations such as warehouse receipts and contract farming, and
support the emergence of viable local rural financial institutions; (ii) develop financial markets to support
the enhanced capacity of financial institutions to lend and meet the market demand; (iii) strengthen farmer
organizations so that the production end of agricultural value chains becomes an effective influence on
agricultural finance policy-making; (iv) improve financial literacy and farmer business education, inclusive
of both men and women, as well as youth; and (v) ensure a sustainable flow of information on markets,
output prices, cost of inputs, and cost and conditions of finance and credit.Innovative solutions are required for staple food crops and can involve the public sector or public-private
partnerships. Some finance models that have been applied with some success to cash or export crops could
also be tried with staple crops. Among these are: (i) the social lender model (which focuses on lending directly
to producer organizations and small-scale businesses); (ii) direct financing of outgrower schemes where
producer-buyer relations already exist; and (iii) finance schemes that involve two or three partners, including
a finance institution and producer organization, with a government agency (sometimes with donor financial
support) often supplying a guaranteed fund to back up the programme.One example is Ghana’s National Rural Growth Programme (NRGP), which has test- piloted a new credit
system as part of the value chain development targeting industrial crops, exported fruits and vegetables,
crops grown especially by women, and livestock. Under the programme, farmer groups, including those
participating in outgrower schemes, can register as a company known as a Special Purpose Vehicle (or SPV).
The SPV has access to commercial bank finance and can provide farmers (or outgrowers) with input credit
(fertilizers, herbicides, etc.), machinery and other mechanical services, as well as training in group cohesion
and coordination. The programme appears to be working, with a steady increase of participants – over 2 500
Ghanaian farmers (as of July 2012) benefit from the credit system – and with high repayment rates (91-98%).Nigeria offers a different model to facilitate access to credit for value chains. Under the incentives-based
Shared System, the government of Nigeria, through the central bank, provides incentives to commercial
banks to lend to private agribusinesses by reducing their investment risks in the agricultural sector.
As a result, many commercial banks in Nigeria have expanded their lending and investment activities,
focusing particularly on seed production where they have been actively seeking potential partners to
expand seed production and distribution.Another promising approach to facilitate access to credit for producers in staple food value chains is the
inventory credit or warrantage system. Under this system, producers stock specific quantities of surplus
production (usually cereals or other easily storable crops) in a reliable warehouse, jointly managed with
a financial institution. The stored crop is used as collateral in order to access credit. Once the credit is
reimbursed, the producer can retrieve the production and sell it when market prices are at their seasonal peak.
The warrantage system, first introduced by FAO in Niger, has since spread to several countries of the region
and is being taken up by a growing number of cereal-based producer organizations. Under the European
Union-funded project, All-ACP Programme for Basic Commodities in the African-Caribbean and Pacific (ACP)
countries, FAO examined several producer organizations in West Africa and concluded that, while warrantage
is a powerful institutional innovation for credit access, its success depends on a number of critical conditions
being met, such as: (i) the presence of a local financial partner; (ii) a functioning producer organization with
sufficient internal coordination capacity and sufficient storage capacity; (iii) a storable commodity subject to