We take a closer look at the work of some MiN members and their role in the Smallholder Safety Net Upscaling Programme (SSNUP) as they help increase the resilience of smallholder farmers in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Set up in 2020, the Smallholder Safety Net Upscaling Programme (SSNUP) is a ten-year programme that aims to increase the productivity and resilience of smallholder farmers in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Through knowledge sharing and financial support from impact investment funds – the target of which is EUR 55 million – the programme seeks to improve risk management and increase sustainable, climate-smart farming practices.
These outcomes will bring multiple benefits to smallholder farmers and their communities – for example, more sustainable and efficient farming methods will result in higher productivity and therefore increased income, while improved agricultural risk management and insurance products will build resilience. The programme also aims to simplify business transactions, investments and governance, which will strengthen agricultural value chains. As a result, food security for these communities will be strengthened, aligning the programme with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Speaking on its impact the SSNUP’s Project Coordinator, Matthew Genazzini said:
“The programme plays the role of being a technical assistance (TA) facility for multiple impact investors and aims to strengthen agricultural value chains and the smallholder households that supply them. This unique set-up of partnering with multiple impact investors provides an enormous opportunity to implement a wide range of projects and benefit a variety of actors within those value chains, such as SMEs, financial institutions, and cooperatives.”
Achieving such goals would be impossible without the input of the project’s key stakeholders, which include the Luxembourg Government, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), member of the MiN. Another longstanding member of the MiN, ADA (Appui au Développement Autonome), a Luxembourg-based NGO and an expert in inclusive finance and driver of partnerships and innovation in this sector, coordinates the programme.
Eight investors, including MiN member Grameen Crédit Agricole Foundation (which targets microfinance institutions that serve women and rural populations), Incofin, Oikocredit, responsAbility, Symbiotics, Alterfin, AgDevCo and SIDI, are providing financing and technical assistance to agricultural value chain players, enabling them to provide credit, insurance and training to smallholder farmers. Not only will these actions contribute towards the SDGs, but they will help strengthen governance and ESG compliance too.
Innovative approaches
One such project currently being delivered under the SSNUP umbrella is the Index Insurance Project in West Africa, a two-year project run by impact investor Oikocredit, and MiN member and microinsurance broker Inclusive Guarantee. Together they aim to bring index insurance to 60,000 farmers, increase risk awareness, and implement a new digital platform to facilitate outreach into rural areas.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is also on the agenda for SSNUP projects, in particular an AI application which aims to improve the assessment of grains and crops sold by farmers in India. Impact investor Incofin Investment Management hopes five million farmers will benefit from the app enabling quicker crop sales and ensuring greater transparency and better price fixing.
Mobile app projects have also been piloted in Peru by Educafe and impact investor responsAbility. The purpose of the app is to enhance information exchange between coffee cooperatives and farmers, such as information on weather and materials on farm management. Over one year, the project aims to target 1,180 coffee farmers.
As the programme progresses and projects are implemented, Genazzini hopes to glean a whole set of data, learnings and good practices that will be packaged and disseminated to benefit the wider sector.
“The flexibility of the programme and the bottom-up approach of TA project design, whereby it is the investees (beneficiary institutions) with the help of the TA facilities that define and design the TA projects, means that projects always respond to a need identified in the field – whether that is a specific service or training need of the smallholder farmer, or perhaps an internal management issue of the investee in order to work more efficiently to better serve their farmers,” concluded Genazzini.
Further information about the SSNUP projects can be found here.