MARARABA – Cooperative societies operating under the Rural Finance Institution Building Programme (RUFIN), a programme of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), have accessed over N6 billion loans from formal banks, a coordinator has said.
Mrs Uneka Ufaruna, Deputy National Coordinator (RUFIN) and a Monitoring and Evaluation Expert of the institution, disclosed this at a Workshop for Cooperative Inspectors in Maraba. [eap_ad_1] “When we started the people had no access to financial services; in 2011 we were able to facilitate over N47 million in the 12 states in terms of credit to the rural poor.
“As at June this year, access of the poor to rural financing is to the tune of over N6 billion; that is from formal banks.
“Traditionally, the people also engage in savings and credit within their groups and those savings and credits they also lend to their members although the value is low.
“In all the states when we started, those savings and credit businesses were at its lowest ebb.
“But we have been able to facilitate them and the savings and lending by now is to the tune of over N4 billion in all the 36 LGAs.”
RUFIN’s main objective is to build institutions and micro enterprises that enhance access of the rural poor to finance services for improved livelihood and empowerment.
The programme which runs for seven years spanning 2010 to 2016 is already in its fifth year.
It is operated with a $27.2 million fund in 36 local government areas in 12 states; two states each, of the six geopolitical zones of the country.
These states are Adamawa, Anambra, Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Benue, Edo, Imo, Katsina, Lagos , Nasarawa, Oyo and Zamfara.
Similarly, Dr Dickson Okolo, Director, Department of Cooperatives, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, reiterated the need for effective capacity of cooperative inspectors to strengthen the institution.
“The meeting is on skill gap analysis as it affects the cooperative inspectors from state departments of cooperatives.
“Essentially what we are discussing is financial inclusion of rural folks; you find that the people who actually deal with the financial cooperatives and indeed cooperatives as a whole are the inspectors.
“But we discovered that the inspectors have a lot of challenges in terms of knowledge gaps.
“So the exercise we are having today is a study to identify the specific knowledge gaps of inspectors in the RUFIN states and there are 12 of them.
“There is a lot of gaps that need to be bridged and we think we should be able to also address issues of the training modules that are required to target the knowledge gaps that have been identified and then follow up to conduct the training for the inspectors.”
Okolo also further reiterated the importance of cooperatives to the Growth Enhancement Support (GES) Scheme and Agricultural Transformation Agenda of government.
“The registered cooperatives that are into agriculture are about 85 per cent.
“So if we are able to get it right for them to function then definitely it means that in some of our agriculture systems we will begin to get them right.
“The effort the Federal Ministry of Agriculture is making is to link the cooperative societies that are agriculture-based to value chain activities within the ministry.
“So that are benefiting and participating in the (GES) and getting their input through electronic wallet, many of them are even agro-dealers in the ministry.
“So you can see that they are actually making a very significant contribution in terms of food production.”
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