September 10, 2020: RERP signed an agreement with Sana Kisan Laghubitta Bittiya Sanstha Limited (SKBBL) on cooperatives’ capacity development and subsequent wholesale lending to project selected Coops as well as facilitating linkage banking for smallholders within their community.
SKBBL, a subsidiary of Agriculture Development Bank Ltd. has been providing wholesale credit and institutional capacity building of affiliated Coops.
Rural finance activities implemented through RERP mainly aims at improving the use of and access to appropriate financial services by tackling bottlenecks on both the supply-side and demand-side in project areas, closing the gaps between financial institutions and their prospective customers–individuals, households, producer groups and RMSEs.
In line with the above, RERP aims to strengthen the capacity of at least 150 cooperatives providing financial services in project areas in terms of outreach and product range of individual Coops.
Also, RERP facilitates to build better linkages between wholesale lenders and local retail financial service provider (esp. Coops) to increase availability of loan capital and liquidity in the rural finance sector in project areas.
Apart from the RERP selected Coops, SKBBL has also provided the list of active small farmer agriculture cooperatives within RERP's production cluster. These cooperatives will be serving as a Focal Cooperatives between RERP and SKBBL in order to facilitate wholesale lending and loan financing to smallholders, producer groups/agriculture value chain groups as well as other production activities.
