Both / And: Facilitating gender inclusive lending for agricultural enterprises

Published 06 September 2022

Author: Meredith Husar

Our Year 3 Learning Report shares data and case studies drawn from 1,567 agriculture loans totaling $152M, more than double the volume captured in our Y2 report. We present high-level metrics from Aceli’s financial incentives program, data trends in agri-SME lending across East Africa, and ingredients for sustained lender behavior change. We also explore emerging data on the additionality and impact of loans across different size segments.

The Year 3 Learning Report centers on three themes:

  1. Loan size: Our pre-launch projections anticipated that most of the addressable market would be in the $200k-$1M range, but our latest data is showing far greater unmet but still addressable demand down-market. Aceli has pivoted to meet the market where it is by lowering our loan size minimum to $15k for certain high-impact market segments, increasing access to finance for unserved SMEs, particularly those owned by women and youth.
  2. Lender behavior: Data from Aceli-supported loans and feedback from lenders indicate a material shift in lenders’ collective reach to new geographic areas, value chains, and enterprise profiles, particularly women- and youth-owned SMEs, since joining the incentives program. 
  3. Evidence-based policies: At each decreasing loan size segment within Aceli’s range ($15k-$1.75M), there is a correspondingly higher volume of SMEs that are either completely unserved or significantly underserved by the financial markets. Our data points to an emerging case for African governments and international donors to boost inclusive economic growth by strengthening enabling environments for agri-SMEs, particularly those requiring finance under $200k. 

View the Report

 

The 2024 Financial Benchmarking Report presents an analysis of key Agri-SME lending trends in East Africa, drawing insights from a dataset of 20k agriculture loans valued at $1.2B disbursed between 2019 and 2022. This data was sourced from 35 lenders, including commercial banks, non-banking financial institutions (NBFIs), and multi-country social lenders operating across Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Key takeaways:

  • Agri-SME lending by these lenders has experienced remarkable growth, with the value of the loan book tripling between 2019 and 2022 from $154M to $497M.
  • Notably, Tanzania leads this growth trajectory, propelled by supportive central bank policies initiated in 2021.
  • Commercial banks make up 90% of the loans in the dataset and their lending is increasing at an impressive compounded annual growth rate of 50% from 2019 to 2022.
  • The vast majority of the growth is concentrated at smaller ticket sizes below $200k, with the $10k-25k segment substantially outpacing growth in the other loan size segments.
  • 20-35% of loans are consistently allocated to new borrowers across most countries and lender types, signaling steady and sustainable growth.
  • Bank lending to agriculture has more than tripled in volume and doubled as a total share of their loan portfolios (from 2.0% in 2019 to 4.1% in 2022); but Agri-SME lending still constitutes a modest proportion of their overall lending.
  • Lenders continue to highlight high risks and origination costs as primary impediments to Agri-SME lending.

View the Report

 

Aceli Africa believes that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards can have a positive impact on the performance of both lenders and their agricultural SME borrowers and should therefore be integrated into the policies and practices of these actors. We require our partner lending institutions to commit to and practice ESG standards that meet or exceed Aceli Africa’s ESG standard outlined in our policy.

This ESG policy applies to all lenders seeking to participate in Aceli Africa’s financial incentive program. The policy is complementary with the governing laws and regulations for environmental and social practices in each country. Lenders participating in the Aceli financial incentive program are expected first and foremost to comply with laws in each country where the lender is operating and, secondarily, to comply with Aceli’s ESG policy by meeting or exceeding the ESG due diligence criteria related to underwriting and managing any loans that are submitted to Aceli for financial incentives.

Read Aceli’s ESG & Impact Policy Summary.

 

 

Aceli began its partnership with 60 Decibels (60dB) in 2021 to understand the impact of the loans it supports on small and medium enterprises (SMEs), farmers, and employees. Aceli believes that access to finance at the SME level will support improved operations that generate benefits for both farmers and workers.

This October 2023 Aggregate Impact Snapshot presents insights from surveys conducted by 60dB with 63 SME representatives working with 6 financial institutions in Kenya and Tanzania. Key insights include:

  • With support from Aceli’s incentives, lenders are serving SMEs that had not borrowed from financial institutions before, or that lack access to alternative financing of a similar caliber
  • SME representatives are overall satisfied with their loan and likely to recommend it to other SMEs
  • Financing is helping SMEs improve operations, increase revenue, better serve more farmers, and improve their range of services offered

The next publication (to be released mid-2024) will explore Aceli’s impact in greater detail. It will share findings from farmer and employee experience surveys conducted pre-financing (baseline) and post-financing levels.

Read the Aggregate Impact Snapshot

 

Aceli’s 2023 Financial Benchmarking Report covers data gathered for an additional 13.2k loans totaling $749M issued by 31 lenders to agri-SMEs in East Africa during the period 2019-2021.

Key takeaways:

  • Aceli’s partner lenders increased their lending (largely independent of our incentives, which took effect towards the end of this period) despite the challenging macro environment.
  • Nevertheless, recent growth in agri-SME lending is from a low base and still represents <5% of the overall portfolios for commercial banks in the region.
  • Lending data and interview responses underscore the need to address the top two barriers identified by lenders: i) high risk and ii) high transaction costs of agri-SME lending.
  • Aceli’s incentives reduce the return gap of agri-SME lending relative to other sectors and are beginning to shift lender practices in promising directions: smaller ticket sizes, new value chains (see impact profile of loans to cassava SMEs in Tanzania), more remote geographies, and businesses that meet Aceli’s impact criteria, particularly for women and the environment. 

Read our Year 2 Learning Report for reflections on Aceli’s engagement with lenders in support of loans to agri-SMEs across Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.

View the Report

 

Our Year 2 Learning Report reflects on Aceli’s engagement with lenders in support of 713 loans totaling $85M to agri-SMEs across Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Key takeaways:

  • Relative to Aceli’s pre-launch projections, we have shifted our approach to smaller loan sizes – this translates into lower capital mobilized on the one hand, but higher capital additionality and, we believe, higher impact than envisioned.
  • There is a need for increased evidence across the sector about what works in terms of both mobilizing finance for agricultural SMEs and how to steer capital to where it can have the greatest impact. Aceli and our learning partners are undertaking several studies to fill these knowledge gaps.
  • Our initial experience suggests that shifting lending behavior among commercial banks (which collectively are the highest volume lenders to agri-SMEs but by no means the only ones) requires: i) senior-level commitment; ii) defined agriculture strategy; iii) empowered middle manager; iv) awareness and internal alignment across departments; and v) dissemination of the model and engagement at the branch level as well as headquarters.
  • The response from lenders is palpable. In the words of Sabasaba Moshingi, CEO for Tanzania Commercial Bank, “Your vision helped us develop the appetite for ag. Previously, we would have been thinking twice before doing agri-lending. You guys are giving us courage.”

See our 2023 Financial Benchmarking Report to review data gathered for 13.2k loans totaling $749M issued by 31 lenders to agri-SMEs in East Africa during the period 2019-21.

View the Report

 

Cassava is one of the most important food crops in Tanzania and across East Africa. It is also an important source of food and income for an estimated 1.9M smallholder farmer households in Tanzania, including roughly half of farm households in the Kigoma region.

We profiled a cluster of 9 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Northwestern Tanzania that are accessing their first loans to purchase cassava from 1,980 smallholder farmers. These SMEs received loans from Tanzania Commercial Bank (TCB), who were originally deterred from lending to cassava enterprises in this region due to the far proximity from its closest branch and limited fixed assets for collateral. Aceli’s financial incentives helped TCB overcome these barriers to lending to this market segment, and the bank is now preparing for a second round of loans in June 2023.

Read the impact profile to learn more

The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) profiles Aceli approach to incentivizing lending to agricultural small and medium enterprises in East Africa, key insights and results to date, and opportunities for the model to be applied to other markets.

Read the SDC case study here.

 

Women form a majority of the agricultural workforce in East Africa as farmers and employees in agricultural value chains, but there is a vast gender gap in economic opportunities across the sector. Similar gaps persist at the level of senior management, board, and business ownership, where women entrepreneurs struggle to access capital relative to their male counterparts.

Overcoming these disparities will require a range of interventions from policy changes to shifts in cultural norms around gender roles. While no single actor can tackle these alone, it is essential that every actor aiming to build a more prosperous African agriculture sector – or a thriving economy more broadly – integrate gender inclusion into their strategy.

Our new Learning Brief highlights:

  • Aceli’s Approach to Gender Inclusion: Our experience adapting the 2X Criteria to lending for agri-SMEs in East Africa
  • Our Data: Learning from our first 22 months of offering impact-linked financial incentives for lenders
  • The Opportunity Ahead: Actions that Aceli and our partners are taking to close the economic opportunity gap for women, and outstanding questions for further exploration

Read it here

In 2021, a woman-owned coffee enterprise in Rwanda received its first formal loan of $100,000 from a lender that was supported by Aceli’s financial incentives.[1] The loan enabled the entrepreneur to improve production on her own coffee farm, purchase from 1,425 farmers (including 537 women) and employ nine workers (six women). Within a year, the business increased revenues by 60%, more than doubled its coffee purchases from farmers, repaid its loan, and accessed a new loan of $150,000. 

Meanwhile, a maize aggregator in Rwanda also received its first formal loan in 2021 of $30,000. While this business is owned by a male entrepreneur, it creates economic opportunities for numerous women employees (six of its 15 full-time workers are women) and farmer suppliers (101 of the 123 smallholder farmers selling to the enterprise are women).

Much of the dialogue related to “gender inclusive” or “gender smart” investing is focused on facilitating access to finance for women entrepreneurs. Aceli’s experience mobilizing lending for small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs) in the agriculture sector points to the need for a “both / and” strategy – both increasing the number of women-owned agricultural SMEs that are able to access finance and recognizing that male-owned enterprises have an important role to play in women’s economic empowerment. As Aceli enters our third year of operations, we are drawing upon recent analysis of the loans supported by our incentives to understand the various ways in which women benefit from access to finance for agri-SMEs and how we can optimize our incentives, technical assistance, and market facilitation to promote economic opportunities for women entrepreneurs who have struggled to access finance as well as for the large numbers of, managers, employees, and farmers who can benefit from agricultural SMEs, regardless of the entrepreneur’s sex.

Data findings from two years of incentivizing gender inclusive lending

 

Aceli is a market incentive designed to address the high risks and transaction costs of lending to small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs) in the agriculture sector. By 2025, we aim to mobilize $600M in capital by 2025 to 1,500 underserved agricultural SMEs in East Africa. Our incentives steer lenders to seek out and serve the highest impact SMEs with a particular focus on women-led businesses or SMEs that otherwise meet the 2X Challenge Criteria [2] for gender inclusion based on the composition of their leadership teams, board members, employees, or farmer suppliers.

In this blog and a forthcoming learning brief, we share learning related to gender inclusion from Aceli’s work over the past two years with 25 lenders in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. With support from USAID INVEST, we analyzed 467 loans registered for Aceli incentives from the program’s launch in September 2020 thru June 30, 2022.[3]

Reach. The enterprises receiving Aceli-supported loans collectively employ 9.8k workers, including 4k women (41%), and create market access for 427k smallholder farmers, including 178k women (42%).

Above target. At launch, Aceli set a goal of 30% of loans meeting the 2X criteria in line with the threshold established by 2X for a “gender inclusive portfolio.” To date, 68% of Aceli-supported loans (319 of 467) meet the 2X criteria.

Gender inclusion vs. women-owned businesses. The majority of Aceli’s supported loans that meet the 2X criteria do so based on: women employees (43% of total loans), senior leadership (31%), board members (22%), or farmer suppliers (21%). Only 8% of Aceli-supported loans go to businesses that are fully or majority owned by women. 

Gender and access to finance. SMEs that are gender inclusive have higher revenues and receive larger loans than non-gender inclusive SMEs. By contrast, women-owned SMEs (100% or majority) have significantly lower revenues ($376k v. $865k) and receive smaller loans compared to male-owned SMEs ($98k v. $137k). Interestingly, women-owned businesses receive larger loans relative to their annual revenues compared to male-owned businesses (46% v. 38%).[4] 

Women-owned businesses are more gender-balanced. Women-owned businesses hire a slightly higher percentage of women employees (41% v. 33%) and are significantly more gender-balanced in senior leadership (57% of leadership roles held by women v. 23%) and in their boards (62% v. 16%) than male-owned businesses. However, both women- and male-owned businesses purchase from a similar percentage of women farmers (44% for both groups).

Differential treatment? Women- and male-owned businesses tend to receive a similar percentage of the loan amount they request (~89% across ownership categories) and interest rates are comparable across Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania, though there appear to be some differences in Uganda.

What’s next? The gap between the large proportion of enterprises that meet the 2X criteria and the small percentage of women-owned SMEs has prompted us to reassess how Aceli promotes economic opportunities for women. Over the past six months, we’ve:

  • Revised our gender impact bonus to offer a “double bonus” for loans to SMEs that meet multiple criteria across women’s leadership (i.e., ownership, management, board) and participation as employees and farmer suppliers;
  • Set targets and developed a strategy for reaching more women-owned SMEs through our technical assistance (currently 27% of SMEs accessing Aceli-supported technical assistance are women-owned and we’ve set a target of 40% by 2025);
  • Offered a series of workshops on gender lens investing for 17 lenders and deeper advisory engagements with two lenders in partnership with Value for Women (VfW);
  • Launched a matchmaking service to connect SMEs graduating from Aceli’s technical assistance program to lenders; and 
  • Begun exploring with VfW how to support continuous improvement on gender inclusion for SMEs (eg, in their hiring and human resources practices). 

Informed by learning with our partners and across the growing sector of practitioners testing and refining approaches to gender lens investing, Aceli will continue to evolve our product offering to address deeply entrenched barriers for women entrepreneurs and women’s economic empowerment more broadly. Our upcoming learning brief will go into more detail on Aceli’s learning to date and our thinking on this topic. 

About Aceli

Aceli Africa (Aceli) is a market incentive facility that seeks to bridge the gap between capital supply and demand for agricultural SMEs and unlock their growth and impact potential. Aceli raises grant funding from public and philanthropic donors and offers a combination of financial incentives for lenders and technical assistance for both SMEs and lenders. More information on Aceli’s work promoting gender inclusion in the agri-finance sector is available in a companion blog co-written with Value for Women, case studies detailing two gender lens advisory engagements by VfW with Aceli lending partners, and our forthcoming gender inclusion learning brief. 

Footnotes

[1] Aceli’s incentives share in the risk and defray the transaction costs so the lender can cover its costs; an impact bonus is included to motivate lenders to seek out and serve gender inclusive businesses. Read more about Aceli’s incentives here.

[2] The 2X Challenge outlines and defines an international standard / set of criteria for gender inclusive portfolios within Development Finance Institutions to increase private sector investments in women around the globe.

[3] Aceli is a market incentive facility designed to increase lending to high-impact agricultural SMEs. Launched in 2020, Aceli is currently working in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda with 27 financial institution partners, including commercial banks and non-bank financial institutions domiciled in the region as well as international impact investors. Participating lenders are eligible for financial incentives that are tiered to offer lenders larger rewards for loans registered with Aceli that are to higher impact SMEs as described further here.

[4] The disparity in loan size for gender inclusive SMEs relative to non-gender inclusive SMEs may be partly linked to value chain as a higher proportion of the former (40%) operate in formal value chains (eg, export crops such as coffee as opposed to informal value chains for staple crops) than the latter (24%). However, women-owned SMEs have a similar distribution by value chain than their male-owned counterparts so other factors account for the differences in enterprise size.