Farmers Benefit from Social Lender, OCP Africa

Farmers Benefit from Social Lender, OCP Africa

As part of efforts to alleviate the suffering of Nigerians in the rural communities, over 100,000 smallholder farmers have got personalised financial services as Social Lender – a fintech company and OCP Africa – one of the largest fertilizer companies in Africa – are working together to assist farmers.

More than 60 per cent of smallholder farmers in Nigeria do not have Bank Verification Number (BVN) and are currently unbanked or under-banked. To alleviate this problem, Social Lender collaborated with OCP Africa to bring financial services to Nigerians especially those in the value chain.

The Country Manager, OCP Africa Fertilizers Nigeria, Caleb Usoh, said the aim of the partnership “is to ensure financial inclusion of a larger percentage of smallholder farmers in the country through BVN registrations and financial literacy training.”

According to him, the collaborative effort would alleviate their sufferings and help them to improve their lives.

He added that the collaboration with Social Lender would help to prepare the farmers to gain access to competitive financial services provided by top institutions in Nigeria and beyond, and help improve their livelihood.

Explaining how the partnership was formed with Social Lender, Usoh said the company emerged as one of the winners of the prized grant of the OCP-supported Impulse Start-up Accelerator challenge fund programme.

“This has boosted the partnership and is reflected in the increased number of beneficiaries who have accessed the services on offer,” he said.

The partnership would allow Social Lender the opportunity to leverage OCP Africa’s existing 51 retail input distribution hubs called the One Stop Shop, which is spread across rural farming communities in Nigeria.

Social Lender would provide several services to the farmers which include a series of financial literacy training, financial inclusion through the creation of BVN accounts, mobile money and credit profiling as well as helping the farmers to obtain small scale loans.

The Chief Executive Officer of Social Lender, Faith Adesemowo, reiterated the importance of the partnership by inviting other organisations interested in serving the huge market segment to collaborate with Social Lender. She informed that her company was building a low cost distribution infrastructure model needed to serve the unbanked and under banked.

“We are building an innovative solution to serve this market effectively. The Social Reputation score is our main asset. For the offline market, we have started with a pilot in 2018 with CGAP, a division of the World Bank. Working with EFINA, we have scaled to six states including two Northern states. With OCP Africa partnership, we will add 31 locations and cover 14 states,” she said.

Adesemowo said the company remained a fintech that works across all industries. “We have just chosen to have a strategic focus in agriculture due to the fact that a large number of the financially excluded are a part of this demography. Social Lender may someday become a full agritech but for now, we are fintech working in agriculture”, she said.

The Chief Operating Officer of Social Lender, Mudiaga Ogboru, said partnership with OCP had further unlocked the value in the agricultural value chain, as more farmers have gained access to formal financial service like agro-loans, equipment leasing financing, fertilizer on credit, quality seeds and other agro-necessity.

“We are building a network for trust, credit and much more. For us, financial literary is the bedrock for financial inclusion and economic inclusion. We have built a robust financial literacy curriculum that is sufficiently equipped and digestible to the farmers because it is communicated in a language that is most comfortable for the farmers,” he said.

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