"At Opportunity International, we believe agriculture finance is the missing link to bridge the gap from food scarcity to security." -Vicki Escarra, The Huffington Post
We are creating innovative financial tools that help farmers grow their farms, improve their crops and increase their yields.
This year, Opportunity International's agriculture finance products have enabled an estimated 80,000 farmers in Africa to buy seed, irrigate land and fertilize crops. We have also trained farmers in modern techniques and connected them with trustworthy markets so they make the most of our financial support.
The result: farmers who could barely feed their families now cultivate a sustainable business that allows them to save for lean times, send their kids to school and season-by-season lift themselves out of poverty - all while producing more food for a hungry continent. We are creating tools that improve international farming and lead to lasting economic change.
Our Global Agriculture Finance Initiative Features:
- Agriculture-Specific Financial Tools - loans, savings, transformational training and insurance tailored to the unique economic needs of rural communities. For example, weather-indexed crop insurance reduces the risk for our banks, enabling them to lend to farmers based on the assurance that their investment in protected in case of weather-related crop failure.
- Rural Outreach & Access - bringing the bank to the doorstep of isolated farming communities around the world through satellite branches, kiosks, POS devices and cell phone banking with the goal of an access point within a 1-hour walk of each client.
- Technological Leverage - utilizing powerful GPS technology to map each farmer's land, using the collected data to create a strategy that maximizes each farmer's harvest by identifying potential new crops, the appropriate amount of inputs (seeds, fertilizer, etc.) needed and through facilitating cooperation with extension service partners.
- Side Selling Mitigation - mititgating sales of crops before the end of the season, which minimizes product value, through supplementary advances late in the growing season that alleviate illiquidity and by providing financial literacy training to equip individuals to plan for uneven income flow.
