Over 200 women across Busia County are set to benefit from cheap loans and other incentives courtesy of the Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC).
AFC has also partnered with the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women).
UN Women and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Kenya Gender and Human Rights Lead, Queen Katembu said that women in the county have the capacity to produce much more than they did from agriculture-related businesses.
However, Katembu said they were being held back by bottlenecks such as “small mentality”, lack of title deeds and information which prevent them from making proper financial decisions when it comes to agribusiness.
AFC Managing Director Lucas Meso said that the corporation’s aim is to empower women and youth in the county and facilitate them with financial aid to ensure not only food and nutrition security but also become self- dependent through acquisition of loans and other incentives.
“Busia County has ample agricultural resources but people have minimum knowledge on how best to manage this resources in order to make agriculture a profitable activity hence the need for the sensitization” he said.
Meso added that AFC will collaborate with county governments to ensure that farmers got support at the grassroots level since agriculture is a devolved function.
The AFC Busia branch has given out approximately 100M in loans to farmers in the county since its inception in 2016.
Among the loans offered by the corporation are; seasonal crop credit, livestock and fisheries development loans, horticulture, floriculture loans, cash crops loans, water development loans for water projects and irrigation, agribusiness loans, machinery loans, and sugarcane development loans offered for as low as 5% interest per annum.
The UN Women and AFC will conduct a two-month baseline survey across 24 counties to find out the factors affecting women in agriculture.
The Sh 6 million survey will enable them to carry out targeted interventions in order to push for women’s participation.