On PlusPlus, a crowdfunding platform co-founded by Cordaid, you can now invest in a microcredit partner that offers loans to Rwandan farmers. Abeza Josée is one of them.
For a long time, this maize farmer considered her farming just for survival. After joining a farmer savings group, her life changed. She could invest in her crops and increase her yields with the loans she received. The extra profit she reinvested in land. Now, Josée is a businesswoman, with 4 times the land size she once had and with her own tailor business. For women like Josée, access to finance is a key to success. European investors can now provide her with that at PlusPlus.
“I never imagined that I could live off farming, save and invest in other economic activities”, Abeza Josée says. “I used to practice traditional farming for the survival of my family. From my 20 acres of land, I harvested 80 kg of maize. I felt satisfied as long as my children could eat and had the basics they needed.” For many female farmers in Rwanda, this sounds familiar.
“The CLECAM loan allowed me to get access to agricultural inputs on time. I could get seeds at the right time for planting, and fertilizers at the best time to fertilize.”
In Rwanda, Cordaid works to improve the livelihood of poor farmers sustainably. To switch from subsistence farming to making an income from agriculture, farmers need to improve their farming methods and invest in better inputs. They need better seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs to increase their harvests. However, this requires finance, which they do not have.
Self-managed, self-serving
Most farmers in Rwanda do not have access to banks for financial services. For them, farmer savings groups provide an alternative. A farmer savings group is an informal, self-managed group of farmers who organize saving and lending together. The members meet regularly to save money together, each member putting in a certain amount per week or month. When these farmers are part of a cooperative, these groups are still aligned and supervised by the Cooperative leadership. The group savings provide group members with micro-loans at a modest interest rate. In the case of agriculture, it is used to purchase agricultural input for all the group members collectively. This way, the whole group benefits.
For the past four years, Cordaid has been training and supporting Rwandan farmers in setting up savings groups. The training built their financial capacities and other skills, like entrepreneurial skills, planning, group leadership, conflict management, and communication skills. Farmers improved their bookkeeping, savings schemes, loan management, and working with financial institutions as a group. For them, the challenge is not only to have money to buy seeds but also to have it at the right time, when the planting season starts. When the savings group does not have enough, a Micro Finance Institution (MFI) can help them. Like CLECAM.
Josée: “After joining a farmer savings group and being trained, I got confident approaching the microfinance institution for an input loan. The CLECAM loan allowed me to get access to agricultural inputs on time. I could get seeds at the right time for planting, and