Addressing Institutional Voids in Nigeria’s Agricultural Finance Markets through Agri-finance Platforms

In my previous blog “Crowdfarming: Platform-enabled Investment in Nigerian Agriculture”, I talked about how digital platforms are being mainstreamed into agricultural finance markets in Nigeria. This blog describes how digital platforms are addressing some of the underlying problems which have constrained rural farmer’s access to agricultural finance thereby creating gaps which manifest as institutional voids in agricultural finance markets. Historically, agricultural finance markets in Nigeria have been characterised by problems in accessing, disbursing and repaying agricultural credit (Akinola, 2013). Specifically, problems relating to accessing agricultural finance by rural farmers stem from three key issues:

1. Low budgetary allocation to the agricultural sector: Given that agriculture contributes and average of 32% to the Nigeria’s GDP, the budgetary allocation to the sector continues to fall short of the recommended allocation stipulated in the Maputo agreement (PwC, 2018). The Maputo agreement signed in 2003 recommends that the Nigerian government should dedicate 10% of its yearly budgetary allocation to agriculture (NEPAD, 2003). This has however not been the case as Nigeria’s highest percentage budgetary allocation to agriculture since 2003 was 2.23% in 2018 and has dropped to 1.56% in 2019 (Adanikin, 2018). This is still far from the recommended 10% which is deemed necessary for the growth and development of the sector.
2. Low level of credit extension from commercial banks: Aside the government allocation of finance to agriculture, financial institutions such as banks also tend to allocate less of their lending to agriculture when compared to other productive sectors such as oil and gas, manufacturing and real estate (PwC, 2018 ) (Figure 1). An underlying reason for this low commercial bank extension of credit is because over time banks have become averse to lending to farmers due to high rates of defaults (Akinola, 2013).

Figure 1: Commercial bank credit extension to economic sectors in Nigeria (PwC, 2018)

3. Unstructured (rural) agricultural investment environment: Asides government funding schemes in partnership with financial institutions, agriculture, unlike other sectors, has not been packaged in a form that investors – both institutional and individual – can engage with easily. While investors might be able to find some agricultural investment opportunities in the Nigerian stock market, these are usually investments in large scale agricultural corporations and not rural agricultural enterprises – which still account for the larger share of agricultural businesses in Nigeria. Mechanisms which could enable individual investors to directly engage with rural agriculture have been largely unstructured and not opened to the general public.

Institutional voids arise in the absence or weakness of market institutions which perform intermediating functions that improve the efficiency of market activities at a lower cost (Khanna and Palepu, 2005). The problems discussed above can be understood as manifestations of voids in agricultural markets which have come about due to the absence of intermediating institutions; those should effectively facilitate agricultural investment procedure by matching the demand and supply of agricultural finance.

Although research on the use of platform to address constraints in accessing agricultural finance is still nascent, there is however anecdotal evidence that suggests that digital platforms have been mainstreamed into agricultural finance markets by innovators who are using platforms to crowdsource agricultural finance for rural agricultural enterprises in Nigeria (Akeredolu, 2019). These platform-enabled businesses have been able to package rural agriculture into ‘investable units’ which are made available to the general public to invest through mobile or web applications thereby tapping into a new pool of agricultural finance (the crowd) outside conventional sources of agricultural finance. Specifically, these agri-finance platforms address institutional voids which manifest as poor access to agricultural finance by:

1. Serving as intermediaries who efficiently match demand and supply of agricultural finance: These platform-enabled agribusinesses addresses constraints to assessing agricultural finance by intermediating between farmers – who need finance, and investors – who have money to invest in agriculture. Using a digital platform enables these businesses to gather investment funds from large numbers of people in order to fund larger numbers of rural enterprises. Therefore, the use of a digital platform is now attracting new sources of finance into the sector which were previously not accessible by rural farmers.
2. Ensuring loan repayment through complementary offline intermediation: These platform-enabled businesses also perform other non-platform intermediating functions to ensure that crowdsourced funds are efficiently used by rural farmers and repaid. This is achieved through close monitoring of agricultural enterprises that have benefitted from crowdsourced funds. For instance, primary data collected from 21 Thrive Agric’s platform users – showed a 100% repayment rate for funds crowdsourced through the platform. This is also supporting the re-branding of rural agriculture from a venture with low credibility to a legitimate and trustworthy investment opportunity for investors both within and outside Nigeria.
3. Improving farmer-identity and visibility through data gathering: Through their on-boarding activities, which entail identifying credible farmers who crowdsourced funds will be invested in, they gather farmers’ bio-, geospatial-, socio-economic and farm enterprise- data. This will improve the confidence of financial institutions in extending finance to rural farmers through the platform. Gathering these data also reduces the transaction cost incurred by financial institutions in extending credit to farmers. As a result, these platform-enabled businesses are able to access high volumes of agricultural finance, not only from individual investors, but also from financial institutions such as commercial banks due to improved farmer-identification procedures.

Although agri-finance platforms in Nigeria have the potential to ensure increased access to finance by rural agricultural, there is still the question of the sustainability of this model, especially in light of uncertainties regarding the formalisation of crowdsourcing as a channel for accessing agricultural finance in Nigeria. For instance, the securities and allied matters act 2004; and the investments and securities act 2007 both limit private companies from inviting the public to subscribe to company units or raising capital from the general public (Uwaleke, 2018). Aside this restriction, the Security and Exchange Commission still has no specific policy provision for crowdsourcing activities in Nigeria. As a result, although it has becoming widely accepted as an investment channel, crowdsourcing is still a bit of a grey area to investors.

Therefore, although the use of digital platforms is opening up agricultural finance markets to new participants and attracting new streams of finance into rural agriculture; further research is needed to understand the long term sustainability of platform-enabled agri-business as well as the broader developmental implications of agri-finance platforms in Nigeria’s agricultural finance markets.

References

Adanikin, O. (2018) 2019 Budget: 16 Years after, Nigeria fails to implement Maputo Declaration on Agrc, food security [online], Available https://www.icirnigeria.org/2019-budget-16-years-after-nigeria-fails-to-implement-maputo-declaration-on-agric-food-security/ [Date accessed: 27/11/19]

Akeredolu, D. (2019) Crowdfunding in Nigeria: Investing in Agriculture [online], Available: https://businessinnigeria.com.ng/crowdfunding-in-nigeria-agriculture/ [Date accessed: 27/11/19]

Akinola, F. (2013) The challenges of agricultural finance in Nigeria: Constraints to sustainable agricultural and economic revival. International Journal of Business and Social Research, 3(5): 234-244.

Khanna, T, and Palepu, K. G “Spotting Institutional Voids in Emerging Markets.” Harvard Business School Background Note 106-014, August 2005

NEPAD (2003) AU 2003 Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security [Online], Available: https://www.nepad.org/caadp/publication/au-2003-maputo-declaration-agriculture-and-food-security [Date accessed: 27/11/19]

PwC (2018) Evaluating Agriculture Finance in Nigeria: Towards the US$1 trillion African food market by 2030 [Online], Available: https://www.pwc.com/ng/en/assets/pdf/evaluating-agric-finance-nigeria.pdf [Date accessed: 27/11/19]

Uwaleke, U. (2018) Equity crowdfunding: An idea whose time has come, Punch Newspaper [Online], Available: https://punchng.com/equity-crowdfunding-an-idea-whose-time-has-come/ [Date accessed: 27/11/19]

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