One of the major problems facing rural farmers in the country is their inability to have access to financial services from the banks because of collateral issues and other stringent conditions.
To mitigate this, the federal government and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) have been implementing Rural Finance Institution Building Programme (RUFIN) across some states in the country.
It is a 7-year programme designed to improve the performance of member-based non-bank rural finance institutions to enable them to develop sustainable Rural Microfinance Institutions (RMFIs).
The essence of the programme is to scale up the income, food security and general living conditions of poor rural households, particularly women-headed households, youth and the physically challenged.
Bauchi, one of the participating states, has recorded significant success in three hosting local governments
The zonal Manager, North-east (Bauchi) Bank of Agriculture, Mr. Bitrus Haruna Acheka, told Daily Trust that the bank has financed various agricultural projects particularly in the livestock sector in the North-east zone.
Mr. Acheka said the bank was working closely with the RUFIN programme to upscale rural farmers, particularly the women groups’ access to agricultural financing from production to processing.
Mohammed Tukur Usman, who is the Zonal coordinator who oversees RUFIN’s activities in, Adamawa, Bauchi, Katsina and Zamfara states, told Daily Trust that the programme has been tremendous in areas where it was being implemented.
Mrs. Unekwu Ufaruna, the Deputy National Coordinator of RUFIN, said the programme had strengthened the supply of rural financial services through Microfinance Banks (MFBs), non-bank financial NGOs and farmers’ financial co-operatives and development finance institutions like the Bank of Agriculture (BOA).
While assessing the programme in Bauchi, she told Daily Trust that the programme had made a lot of gains in the state because when it started, there were no farmer groups that were linked to any source of finance especially in the target areas.
Some of the benefiting smallholder women groups who interacted with the IFAD assessment team that visited the state shared success stories, which include improved access to finance and some of the challenges like insurgency which drove some of them away from their farms, making it difficult to payback some of the loans.
