Businesses reached globally in 2021
Farmers reached globally in 2021
$5.5 billion lent by CSAF members to 1,546 cooperatives and businesses that supported 6M smallholder farmers overall
Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance
Businesses reached globally in 2021
Farmers reached globally in 2021
$5.5 billion lent by CSAF members to 1,546 cooperatives and businesses that supported 6M smallholder farmers overall
The Council on Smallholder Agriculture Finance (CSAF) is a network of social lenders providing finance in the agricultural sector. CSAF members convene to share learning, develop industry standards and best practices, and engage other stakeholders to address barriers to market growth and impact. Small Foundation supported CSAF’s core operating costs from 2017 to 2021, and remains a proud field-building partner.
Our partnership and learning:
“CSAF’s partnership with Small Foundation in 2021 has allowed us to strengthen collaboration across technical workstreams and build lender resilience and increased impact for agricultural SMEs. Through our impact working group, we renovated our impact metrics to align with the 2X Challenge Criteria for gender inclusion and developed an expanded set of environmental metrics.”
– The Council on Smallholder Agriculture Finance
Our partnership in 2021 built on our previous multi-annual collaboration, which produced research that has provided important sector insights and moved the market forward, and has shown the impact of building trust and connections across an impact network over time.
An example of CSAF member collaboration is Aceli Africa, which was born from conversations and affiliated research among CSAF members about the challenging economics of lending to agricultural SMEs, particularly in less formalised value chains and for smaller loan sizes of $25K–500K.