Experts on AVCF meet to develop policy guidelines

The group is a voluntary multi-stakeholder whose members represent actors from public, private and civil society institutions, and international development partners. The group also represents academia, financial service providers, TVET tertiary institutions, government policymakers and regulators, farmers and producer cooperatives, advocacy groups and practitioners in related sectors.

The expert group will contribute to delivering an outline report on key constraints to digital and AVCF development in The Gambia; a report highlighting the policy tools for digital and AVCF in The Gambia in collaboration with the consultants and a report and commitment document outlining their institution’s plan to advance digital and AVCF.

Speaking at Metzy Hotel, Mariama Ashcroft, technical adviser for the Access to Finance with GIZ ECOWAS FRSD, recalled that the project was launched in 2019 and started operating in 2020. She added that the first big event they organised as part of Access to Finance was in 2021 with a series of activities that involved policymakers in the financial and banking sectors, including financial service providers, practitioners, and development workers.

“Since then, we had quite several activities in which many have participated. We launched the expert group initiative in June and we expressed our gratitude that you stayed with us in the partnership for the contribution to national development,” she further recalled.  

Daouda Sakho, the project’s lead consultant, also reiterated that their plan for the first round of the expert group meeting is to go into their score assignment – which is agriculture value chain dialogue and policy guidelines that could guide the authorities, government, Central Bank, regulators and financial service providers to go into the ecosystem of agriculture value chain financing through the digital opportunity.

“We had discussed the summary of problems identified by the financial services providers regarding access to finance for agriculture stakeholders. For CepRass, which is a resource group, we will be supporting the expert group with input from our studies and we made a baseline to see what we can propose for policy guidelines,” he added.