Currently, around 120,000 SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia need US$160 billion in funding, against which only US$54 billion has been provided, mainly by commercial banks, according to a new report published by the Commercial Agriculture for Smallholders and Agribusiness (CASA) program. Meanwhile, the report has identified four change priorities to address the issue. First and foremost, CASA wants agri-SMEs to be turned into commercially investable prospects to anchor local bank markets for finance. Moreover, appropriate capital and government policy support should be extended across the financing continuum to fill the pipeline of investible agri-SMEs and to offer growth capital to close the long-term financing gap.
