Joan Larrea talks about Convergence Finance, a new platform that will act in part as a matchmaker between public, private and philanthropic investors seeking partners for blended finance structures. Set to go fully live in the next couple of months, it expects agriculture to be a major focus of its efforts.
Harald Hirschhofer, Senior Advisor at TCX Fund, explains how foreign exchange movements represent a major but often underestimated risk for producers, processors and traders of agricultural produce and the institutions that lend to them – and how TCX’s offering of long-term FX hedges and synthetic local currency loans can help the sector mitigate this risk affordably.
A lack of access to modern farming machinery has long held back India’s smallholders from achieving better productivity and income. And at a time when urbanisation is pulling a once large pool of available labour away from agriculture, the problem has taken a fresh twist. EM3 Agri Services CEO Adwitya Dal explains how its pay-per-use mechanisation service is enabling farmers to overcome that hurdle, and how blended finance has helped.
In this interview, Paul Horrocks, one of the expert contributors for the Blending4Ag event, expresses his personal opinion on the status quo and challenges of blended finance, and the involvement of development finance institutions (DFIs).
CTA met with Craig Churchill, Patricia Richter and Pranav Prashad from ILO. The International Labour Organization (ILO) is also interested in joining CTA in the course of driving Blended Finance for agriculture (Blending4Ag) towards sustainability.