Using taxpayers’ money to trigger investment in smallholder farmers and small and medium agribusiness enterprises. This is what the EU’s new Agriculture Financing Initiative, AgriFI, is proposing. AgriFI would help reducing the high risks associated to smallholders and SMEs so that banks and other private sector investors could put their own money into actors that would otherwise find it too difficult to access credit markets. . ECDPM spoke to Roberto Ridolfi, Director for Sustainable Growth and Development at DG DEVCO, during a “Partners in Dialogue” session co-organised by the Swiss Mission to the EU and ECDPM (and moderated by ECDPM’s Director Ewald Wermuth). In this video, Ridolfi explains why he thinks AgriFI and its ‘patient capital’ can help smallholder farmers in Africa by increasing the “biodiversity of private investors”.

To learn more about AfriFI, read this article by Roberto Ridolfi published by ECDPM’s GREAT Insights magazine.