What Farmers Need To Know About NIRSAL Agro Geo-Cooperatives Loan

If you have access to your community and farmers in your locality, here is an untapped income-generating opportunity through the NIRSAL Agro Geo- Cooperatives Formation.

And for the farmers, it’s an opportunity to get access to the Anchor Borrowers Programme or ABP loan.

In one of our publications, we told you how farmers could form a cooperative society to access certain agric loans from the government usually sponsored by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

Here is a great opportunity you don’t want to miss and we will tell you more about how to get involved in this noble programme by the NIRSAL.

NIRSAL means Nigeria Incentive-based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL Plc), a Non-Bank Financial Institution managed by the CBN.

In this post, we’ll also give you the phone numbers of Project Monitoring Reporting and Remediation Officers across Nigeria. They are simply known as PMROs

But before that, you may want to ask…

What’s the NIRSAL Agro Geo-Cooperatives is all about

It is a programme designed to structure smallholder farmers, farmer leaders and aggregators for them to gain access to finance, training, markets and lots of other financing opportunities to boost their production and income.

Who Can Register for NIRSAL’S Agro Geo Cooperative

The programme is another means of employment and a source of income generation by supporting the productive activities of their self-organized Agro Geo-Cooperatives.

The following people can enrol for the NIRSAL Agro Geo Cooperative for the dry season ABP loan application:

• Corporate body
• Youth
• Existing enterprise
• Community leader
• NPower beneficiary
• Unemployed graduate
• An active leader in the ADP programme
• Retired leader and farmer in the ADP programme
• Active and retired leader and farmer in the USAID markets programme
• A farmer in the World Bank FADAMA programme
• An active leader in the farmer in the DFID’s propcom maikarfi programme
• A farmer in the SASSAKAWA global 2000 programme
• A farmer in the IFAD value chain development programme
• Farmer and leader in the World Bank Climate Adaptation and Business Support Programme

Objectives of the initiative are as follows:

1. To create 16,000 Agro Cooperatives on 4 million hectares of farmland
2. To enrol some 8 million Nigerian farmers whose responsibility will be to produce about 12 million metric tonnes of Grain Product Equivalent (GPE) annually over the medium to long term.
3. To gain more knowledge about agribusiness
4. To embrace agriculture
5. To diversify the economy

Who would you be working with?

The real farmers are spread across communities across Nigeria, to make sure that the programme gets to them, the CBN has a structure known as the Project Monitoring Reporting and Remediation Office or PMROs.

Project Monitoring Reporting and Remediation Officers were appointed in each of the states for easy supervision.

Functions of The PMROs

1) To support NIRSAL’s core mandate of making agriculture more attractive for private sector investment

2) To implement ways on of de-risking the agricultural value chain

3) To provide rigorous monitoring and supervision of NIRSAL facilitated agriculture projects to improve successful outcomes

4) To ensure that agric funds are used for the purpose it is meant in line with agreed terms.

5) To generate new projects where necessary

6) To supervise existing projects

7) To mobilize the community to support and own as well as enjoy the positive impact of NIRSAL projects.

8) To deploy private-sector orientation and strategies to drive the projects along agribusiness lines.

9) To ensure that there are sufficient projects in each state to be funded by NIRSAL

Speaking in 2018, the national Coordinating Consultants of PMROs, Dr. Steven Ogidan stated:

“the closeness of the PMROs to project sites and the embedding of project monitoring services within the project sites of any project that is more than 500M ensures effective monitoring and reduces the risk of loan diversion”

List of ABP PMROs and Their Phone Numbers

Ready to Register For NIRSAL Agro Geo-Cooperatives?

Begin your application at https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=IcCsz9w1vEqb1o-HTtpughU1mjILcEZLqZ1F2ebLri9UQkMyME9JRlcyWU5MMFRPRU0xQ1M0QjhKNi4u