Opportunity International’s Agriculture Finance (AgFinance) helps smallholder farmers grow more and earn more. Through targeted financial solutions, training, and support, farmers can increase their production, income, and employment to build thriving and resilient households in rural communities.
Investing in agriculture is key to ending extreme poverty. The AgFinance model offers practical solutions to help farmers improve their farms now and sets up future market-driven services to break the poverty cycle for good. With the right financial support and access to tools and training, rural communities can thrive, hunger can decrease, food security can improve, education can get better, and families can sustain themselves. We're here to drive this change, focusing on boosting rural prosperity by filling in crucial gaps in resources, training, and support.
We help farmers:
Increase their incomes.
With higher-yielding crops, farmers are earning more and re-investing to improve their farms, such as adding irrigation.
Diversify their incomes.
Farmers invest income in additional sources of revenue, such as goats, cows, and chickens, or starting a small side business, improving their long-term financial resiliency.
Improve their living conditions.
With surplus income, farmers will purchase new metal roofs, water purifiers, food, and healthcare.
Send their children to school.
Improvements in farm productivity and income mean more children can go to school instead of staying home to help on the farm.
Improve farm outcomes.
Rural farmers receive training from local Farmer Support Agents (FSAs) in best agricultural practices, Family Business and Entrepreneurship, and finances to help farmers increase crop resiliency, improve soil quality, and build sustainable practices.
The Need
The gap between what smallholder farmers can achieve and what they currently have access to is staggering.
- Smallholders manage approximately 80% of the farmland in sub-Saharan Africa, yet farmers in the region produce less than one quarter of their potential yields (FAO)
- About 78% of the world's poorest people live in rural areas and rely largely on agriculture for their livelihoods (World Bank)
- Market assessments indicate that only 3% of agricultural finance demand is currently met, leaving a $200 billion annual financing gap (ISF)
Investing in agriculture is one of the most powerful actions to improve rural livelihoods. More opportunities in agriculture mean that fewer people go hungry, fewer children miss school, and more rural families can build sustainable livelihoods.
Our Programs and Products
Farmer Support
Opportunity supports rural farmers by:
- Establishing local FSA networks, alongside financial institutions and other stakeholders, to train farmers in good agricultural and financial practices
- Training rural farmers in agribusiness, bookkeeping skills, sustainable agricultural practices, and family business and entrepreneurship
- Establishing rural-focused financial products, encompassing production loans, rural savings accounts, small and medium-sized enterprise loans for agribusinesses, loan guarantees, mechanization loans, crop insurance, and revolving credit facilities
Central to this work are the FSAs themselves, consisting of farmers, local community leaders, and agents of change who connect directly with fellow farmers to help them access finance, improve their farms, and increase their incomes. Equipped with smartphones, FSAs collect data digitally, share training videos, and gather farmer groups to provide training in family business and entrepreneurship, financial literacy, good agricultural practices, regenerative agriculture, and group dynamics. Through these networks, farmers also gain acces to input distribution support, market information, and a broader community of peers to learn from.
Financial Services
In partnership with local financial institutions, AgFinance develops tailored agricultural financial services according to the seasonal needs of small farmers and rural agribusinesses. Opportunity focuses on building the internal expertise of financial institutions, which equips them to grow and maintain sustainable agricultural portfolios long-term so more rural clients can access the capital they need to grow their farms and businesses. We facilitate production loans, providing crucial credit to invest in ag inputs to boost yields.
GUARANTEEING RURAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR WOMEN (GROW)
Economic poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is entrenched and generational, yet there is one group that can disproportionately affect positive change: women. Despite evidence that advancing women benefits entire communities, women lag behind men. Legal, social, and cultural barriers disproportionately exclude women from equal participation in their economies. Capital in the hands of women is one of the best strategies to lift families out of poverty.
AgFinance's Guaranteeing Rural Opportunities for Women program expands access to finance for women farmers and entrepreneurs by partnering with financial institutions to design inclusive credit products, advocating for regulatory reform, and investing in digital tools and blended finance solutions. It empowers women to grow resilient businesses, increase household incomes, and gain greater decision-making power, while also addressing barriers like unpaid care burdens and limited access to land, capital, and climate-resilient resources.
GROW's holistic approach includes:
- Tailored financial products with flexible repayment schedules, asset financing, and group-based lending
- Blended finance models combining public and private capital to reduce lending risks
- Capacity-building and digital lending solutions to strengthen local financial institutions
- Advocacy for regulatory reforms and local currency financing to improve affordability
- Climate-smart agriculture training and support for women-led community initiatives
Regenerative Agriculture and Climate Resilience
Increasing climate disasters are eroding decades of development progress, with rural communities in low-income countries facing disproportionate impacts. This creates an urgent imperative for Opportunity to respond to clients’ rapidly evolving needs and safeguard hard-won gains in poverty reduction and financial inclusion. Opportunity is addressing this crisis head-on by ensuring rural clients can access the support and resources necessary to sustain and grow their enterprises amid mounting threats to their economic stability.
AgFinance works to strengthen climate-resilient development for smallholder farming communities facing disproportionate climate vulnerability. Through coordinated farmer support services and climate-responsive financial products, AgFinance builds adaptive capacity at farm and community levels, helping reduce current climate risks while addressing the institutional and financial constraints that limit adaptation. By integrating regenerative agriculture practices with financial institution partnerships, AgFinance enables inclusive, multi-sectoral responses that reduce smallholder exposure to climate hazards and support equitable pathways toward sustained resilience in the face of compounding climate impacts.
Regenerative Agriculture (RegenAg) plays a central role in this work by helping farmers improve soil health, strengthen crop resilience, reduce dependence on costly external inputs, and protect long-term land productivity. These practices support not only agricultural sustainability, but broader household stability, including:
- Improved household food security
- More reliable income generation
- Increased ability to pay school fees
- Better nutrition and household wellbeing
- Stronger savings and financial resilience
- Greater community collaboration and knowledge-sharing
RegenAg works through practical, locally relevant techniques that farmers can apply within their existing farming systems. The approach focuses on five key principles:
- Minimize soil disturbance
- Maximize crop diversity
- Keep the soil covered
- Maintain living root year-round
- Integrate livestock
Through FSA-led training and demonstration plots, farmers learn how to apply these approaches using locally available resources and climate-smart techniques suited to their environments.
The program emphasizes both sustainability and profitability, helping farmers adopt practices that improve yields while strengthening long-term resilience to climate and market shocks.
Rural Graduation Model
For Opportunity’s AgFinance program to be successful, we must actively prioritize those experiencing extreme poverty, currently defined as living on less than $3 a day. People living in ultra-poverty, defined as those eating below 80% of their daily nutritional needs, especially rural women and children, face challenges most aid programs aren't designed to reach. They spend nearly everything they earn on food, leaving nothing for healthcare, education, or emergencies. Traditional poverty alleviation programs tend to miss these families entirely, offering no safety net for those who need it most.
To address these harsh conditions, we adopted the Graduation path, initially developed by BRAC in 2002, and tailored it to the needs of families grappling with extreme poverty.
Through this program, previously unreachable clients and families receive assets, such as livestock or startup products for a small shop, that help to foster income generation. We also provide training and coaching to empower these farmers with skills and confidence over time.
The Opportunity approach is uniquely enhanced by financial inclusion through the implementation of community-based financial organizations. It sets ambitious goals, striving to improve livelihoods by adding income sources and balancing expenditures, promote gender equity in decision-making, improve food security and nutrition, and foster positive behavior change, social inclusion, and community involvement.
Digital Innovations
Opportunity International’s digital innovations provide solutions that support the financial stability of smallholder farmers and micro, small, and medium enterprises. By using digital solutions at scale and at low-cost, always accompanied by training and support, we can enable people living in rural areas to transform their lives and the lives of future generations.
Accurate, timely information can be life or death for a farmer’s crops. In Malawi, we built and tested FarmerAI, a WhatsApp-based tool that can answer farmers’ questions about farming practices. The tool draws on trusted local resources, including the government's official agriculture guidelines and Opportunity's own Agriculture Finance training materials, and delivers answers through a simple, conversational chat interface in WhatsApp. Early results are impressive: 88% of users report saving time and money, and 67% report increased yields. Building on this success, we are expanding access to Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda.
Our Impact
When smallholder farmers have access to the right tools, training, and financial services, they can grow more than crops—they can grow income, resilience, and opportunity for their families. Our program helps rural farmers increase productivity, strengthen food security, and build more sustainable livelihoods.