About the Webinar

The Inclusive rural financial services and agri-SMEs: Lessons from IFAD’s portfolio event will feature a presentation of the main findings of a recent stocktaking exercise, which assesses IFAD’s capacity to deliver inclusive financial services in the rural space as well as to promote pro-poor rural financial markets through a total of 68 programs carried out over the past 11 years. The stocktaking report considers instruments, approaches, products, and how to mainstream considerations related to climate change, nutrition, gender, age, and environmental impact in this portfolio.

Three key strategic opportunities have emerged from the stocktake, including:

Building on and innovating in community-based financing approaches to increase outreach and impact;Developing catalytic approaches to crowd in more private capital for rural finance within a growing cluster of private sector initiatives within IFAD; Working more intensely to mainstream considerations related to financial service impact in terms of women and youth’s empowerment, nutrition, and environmental sustainability.After a presentation of the stocktaking report, the event will feature a conversation with SAFIN partners about these opportunities, particularly from the perspective of serving agri-SMEs as well as leveraging their value chain roles to increase access to finance for smallholders and other small-scale producers and workers in the rural space.

Speakers

Marc de Sousa Shields is IFAD Lead Regional Technical Specialist, Rural Finance and Markets, based in Cairo (Egypt). In this capacity, he works on a host of rural finance, market access, value chain and private sector support activities in support to IFAD’s regional portfolio.

Howard Miller is a financial inclusion consultant who has worked with IFAD on the rural finance stock-take and a recent update to the Fund’s Rural Finance Policy.