Nigerian Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending(NIRSAL) said it has facilitated the flow of over N30billion into Nigeria’s agricultural value chains within the last 13 months.
Aliyu Abdulhameed, the Managing director of the de-risking agency made the announcement saying that some African countries are understudying NIRSAL’s agribusiness de-risking model, a model he noted has impacted positively on Nigeria’s food security journey.
The MD announced on Thursday during a media interaction with newsmen in Abuja, noting that de-risking agribusiness in Nigeria has sustained livelihoods of about 80% Nigerians operating in the various agricultural value chain.
“Even though our operations suffered a stall during the lockdown of 2020, our technological depth gave us a pathway to return to work while remaining safe and socially-distanced,” he said.
According to him, it is the first global agribusiness de-risking model being coordinated by Nigeria’s Central Bank. “Already, our neighbouring African countries such as Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Rwanda and in talks with us to understudy our agribusiness de-risking model to grow their agricultural sector.”
Speaking further on NIRSAL’s achievement since inception, he said, the agency has facilitated over N148billion in finance and investments for agriculture and agribusiness. “We have also aggregated over 3,000 Agro geo-cooperates with 500,000 farmers on nearly 800,000 hectares of land.”
To curb fiscal levels of postharvest losses that Nigeria suffers, and create efficient routes for commodity movement and storage, the MD said that the agency has been up to some high-level advocacy.
Abdulhameed revealed that NIRSAL has enrolled 1.4 million persons into innovative insurance products it has designed in collaboration with a consortium of agricultural insurance underwriters.
He also disclosed that NIRSAL has initiated and is driving the Agro Geo-cooperative model which facilitates links between the farmer and market to grow and expand their business in cooperative clusters.
“The guarantee of access to markets and that farmer’s produce would be off-taken, provides one part of the incentive that lenders, especially commercial banks, need to finance agricultural projects.”
The NIRSAL MD also noted that NIRSAL is Engaging the federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investments in the development of a policy on secured Agricultural Commodity Transport and Storage corridors.
This policy initiative seeks to enable easier transportation of food from the Northern part of the country to the Southern part of the country to address concerns of loos and wastage.
He noted further that NIRSAL has along the line grown it’s balance sheet to N140billlion, its equity by N1,415 percent and it’s a total asset to 87 percent, adding that the number of farmers its agro-geo-cooperative model in the outgone year has appreciated in numbers.
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