By Emily Engel | Online Community Specialist
Approximately 70% of Africans work in agriculture and these households are some of the poorest in the world. Opportunity found that farmers in Africa are producing at only 40% of their potential because they cannot access the needed best-practice information, financing and markets. With your help we work with small-scale farmers in Malawi to adopt more productive agriculture practices, link up with buyers and extension service providers, and access inputs to grow more food.
Opportunity spent 2010 and 2011 working with small-scale farmers and learning from them which financial tools and services they need to succeed. In 2012, Opportunity’s Agriculture Finance team aims to bring services closer to clients using mobile phone banking. This gives clients access to their funds from their own rural village, and uses GPS to capture household data and map out exact farm plots to better understand how best to use the land.
The agriculture finance program has grown tremendously from its start with Malawian groundnut and tobacco farmers nearly five years ago. Crops funded in Malawi now include: maize, sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco
At the end of 2011, Opportunity served 53,536 active loan clients in Malawi, and 411,840 savings clients.
Thanks for all your support that makes the continuing work in Malawi possible!
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
