ABBOTS LANGLEY, United Kingdom — When Esperance lost her husband a few years ago, she struggled to make enough income from her small maize and bean farm to send her seven children to school. However, after Opportunity International provided her with financial and agricultural training, as well as a loan to purchase fertilizer, her circumstances changed dramatically. Thanks to this agrifinance intervention, Esperance is now able to use the surplus produce from her farm to pay for her children’s education.
Esperance is just one of tens of thousands of Rwandans Opportunity International has helped through agrifinance projects since 2012. Such projects, which have largely been funded through grants by the United Kingdom (U.K.), Scottish and Jersey Governments, aim to raise living standards in rural Rwanda by improving people’s access to financial services and training them in financial and agricultural practices.
The Challenges
The World Bank estimates that 56% of Rwanda’s workforce works in agriculture, with this figure rising to 65% among women. This high dependence on subsistence farming leaves millions of Rwandans struggling to meet necessities, with approximately 49% of the population living below the international poverty line of less than $2.15 per day.
Likewise, subsistence agriculture is leaving Rwandans increasingly vulnerable to varying climatic conditions. The increased frequency of extreme weather events in the past 30 years is already threatening the only source of income for millions of rural Rwandans.
Simple interventions can help boost living standards in rural Rwanda and decrease people’s vulnerability to extreme weather events and other financial shocks. Simple fertilizers, for example, can greatly improve crop yields, which in turn can increase incomes and enable struggling families to send their kids to school. Likewise, livestock can be purchased to diversify farms and produce natural fertilizer, thus strengthening farms’ vulnerability to climatic shocks.
However, in rural villages, many families lack both the knowledge and resources to access the capital needed to make such purchases, with just 37% of Rwandans owning an account at a financial institution. Similarly, many lack the knowledge. This, however, is where Opportunity International comes in.
The Projects
Since 2012, Opportunity International has conducted various projects aimed at providing financial services and agrifinance training to rural Rwandans. One significant initiative was the “Improving Livelihoods in Rural Rwanda” project, which the charity ran in partnership with the Scottish Government from 2017 to 2024.
Through the £1.5 million (about $1.90 million) scheme, Opportunity International aided 15,000 smallholder farms and 4,000 microentrepreneurs in Southern and Western Rwanda by providing access to loans and training in financial literacy and good agricultural practices. The training of 180 banking agents also increased access to financial services.
The project was an unmitigated success, with more than 80% of households stating that their living standards had improved as a result of Opportunity International’s work. Remarkably, the training in financial services was actually praised as much as the access to credit. The evidence suggests that this training will be self-sustaining, as recipients disperse this knowledge among their community, helping to boost the financial literacy of potentially tens of thousands more people.
Furthermore, when the agrifinance project initially struggled with youth inclusion due to young people being underrepresented in village savings and loans associations (VSLAs) and agricultural cooperatives, it was quickly reformed to address this issue. In addition to providing financial training, the project established 200 separate youth savings and loans associations (YSLAs), which allowed young people to combine their resources to save for loans. This initiative helped more than 2,000 young individuals to access financial services.
The Future
While there is clear evidence that the agrifinance projects undertaken by Opportunity International will be self-sustaining and have long-lasting benefits far beyond their original recipients, it is clear that there is still a long way to go to end extreme poverty in Rural Rwanda. Hence, the organization recently announced a new project, in partnership with Jersey Overseas Aid, titled “Inclusive Finance for Agricultural Value Chains in Rwanda.”
The three-year project aims to continue the process of the “Improving Livelihoods” scheme, providing 24,000 smallholder farmers with access to loans and training in finance and good agricultural practice. It will also work alongside 48 farmer groups to improve their governance structure and help them raise the concerns and needs of their members.
Even with this support, there is still a long way to go. Despite the progress, Rwanda remains one of the world’s poorest countries, with a gross national income (GNI) per capita of $980. Therefore, it remains crucial that governments around the world continue to provide Opportunity International and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with the funds needed to make life-changing agrifinance interventions and help people like Esperance for generations to come.
– Ben Evans
Ben is based in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, UK and focuses on Good News for The Borgen Project.
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