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This market shift has been enabled by a number of trends that have influenced the underlying dynamics of providing financial services to smallholder farmers and agricultural small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Many of these trends interact with and reinforce each other, ultimately combining to create the market shift that has galvanized so many new and established providers into the market.

1. Key donors, such as the Mastercard Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and USAID, as well as niche impact investors, such as Acumen and Accion, have contributed over USD $250M [2] in targeted funding for smallholder and rural finance initiatives. These impact-driven investments have provided the patient capital innovators require to prove their business models and product-market fit. As such, they have enabled a proliferation of new models, services, tools, and products that change how FSPs engage with smallholder households and rural agricultural SMEs.
2. We have seen a rise in the presence of ecosystem “connectors” — such as CSAF, SAFIN or Propagate Coalition — bringing private, public, and philanthropic actors together to coordinate agendas, share learnings, and mobilize action. At the heart of these collective partnerships and donor funding, is the mutual commitment to agricultural transformation and the acknowledgment of smallholder farmers and agri-SME as crucial players in global food and nutrition security.
3. There has been an explosion of new digitally-enabled services and approaches to rural finance. These innovations are not only changing what products are being offered, such as new micro-insurance and asset financing options, but are also changing how FSPs conduct their businesses, for example via digitally-based credit scoring, digitally-enabled distribution infrastructure — including e-commerce and interactive farmer training programs. The spread of digitization is impacting both traditional service providers and newcomers, though in slightly different ways, as summarized by CGAP’s latest paper on Fintechs and Financial Inclusion. Traditional players, such as commercial banks and MFIs, tend to leverage digitization to improve their economics and drive operational efficiencies. Meanwhile, the innovators, such as Fintechs and platform players, are leveraging technology to solve pain points that are not addressed by the market incumbents. Underlying this explosion in digital models is a massive expansion in available technologies, alternative data sources, mobile phone ownership, and mobile network infrastructure; providing the basis for digital financial services and digital agriculture solutions that can be layered onto financial services for better risk assessment and service delivery.
4. We are also seeing more bundled products and services as more providers recognize that to effectively meet farmer needs and achieve sustainability a more holistic approach is required — where finance is no longer an end in and of itself, but rather, an enabler of greater impact and overall profitability. From a service provision standpoint, this insight implies a fundamental shift, from considering service-level profitability to customer-level profitability, often utilizing cross-subsidization of multiple service lines and product types. From a farmer standpoint, it implies the acknowledgment that to translate access to finance into positive impact, finance must enable access to inputs, markets, and other value-added services that can drive farm productivity and income gains.
5. We have witnessed a renewed and increased focus on agri-SMEs and value chain finance, driven by the recognition of the leading role a strong SME ecosystem plays in delivering services to farmers and, more broadly, in creating jobs, driving innovation, and shifting to higher value-added economies. An increasing number of corporations, foundations, and governments are supporting small and growing businesses. At the same time a stronger ecosystem of incubators, accelerators, technical assistance providers, investors and impact funds is emerging to address the distinct finance and business development needs of ag-SME. African Management Initiative, Enablis, Technoserve Entrepreneurship, and Stawi Africa are some examples of organizations that recently designed programs for agri-SME entrepreneurial and/or capital support.
6. Finally, we note the emergence of a more sophisticated business-to-business (B2B) market to support the FSPs working in this space. This has taken the form of both B2B products and specialist applications, such as partnership platforms and technology solutions aimed at digitizing specific business processes including, for example, customer registration and data collection, credit risk assessment, or advisory services; as well as business development services (BDS). As business models, product classes, and capital investment structures have become more sophisticated, a specialized set of external consultants (BDS providers) has developed in response, with services ranging from product design, to digitization, to capital restructuring. This strong ecosystem of B2B players has allowed FSPs to focus on their core activities and outsource risky and time-consuming investments.