The Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL Plc) has facilitated credits from commercial banks to agricultural commodity value chains valued at over N146billion.
The Managing Director/CEO of NIRSAL, Aliyu Abdulhameed, stated this in an interactive session with journalists Tuesday in Abuja.
NIRSAL Plc is tasked with galvanising organic economic interest in Nigeria’s agriculture sector; to build conditions that enable borrowers and lenders to engage in the creation of new value across the sector.
He said, “When we say that NIRSAL Plc has facilitated the flow of over N146billion into agricultural commodity value chains from commercial banks, we mean we have brokered deals whose value add up to that figure.”
He said in spite of these huge credits that have gone to the value chain, just about one per cent default rate was recorded.
“CBN tells the banks to make sure that the nonperforming loan-level does not exceed a certain percentage of the total loans but agric being agric sometimes is allowed to even have higher in bills but the beautiful thing about NIRSAL is that you could see that we are still below the industry average even for the riskier segment, that is why you see less than 1 per cent, and that is why in our name, you hear risk,” he explained.
On insurance, he said, “As our own risk mitigation, there is no project that guarantees that we don’t put insurance in the process because when we put insurance at least when there is risk, the insurance people will take care of part of the risk. What we did in NIRSAL is to tell the insurance industry to please create a unique product for each segment of the value chain that speaks to their risk.”
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