San Salvador, El Salvador
How to expand credit placement for coffee and cocoa producers? How can more women be included? Or how can digitalization transform financial service mechanisms? These are some of the questions that MOCCA’s partners in the Access to Finance program will try to answer based on the exchange of experiences.
MOCCA is a 7-year initiative funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) through its Food for Progress Program, which seeks to improve agricultural productivity and expand trade in agricultural products. The MOCCA project is being executed by a consortium led by TechnoServe.
“During the 5 years of implementation of our program, MOCCA has established partnerships with financial actors in 6 countries, whose approaches vary and are adapted to different social and economic contexts. We believe that the establishment of a network of experts and financial institutions could contribute to the scalability of models from one country to another, thus facilitating credit for small producers who are currently outside the financial system and need support to increase the profitability of their farms and improve the lives of their families,” said Miriam Cuadra, MOCCA’s Access to Finance Director.
Technical assistance hand in hand with productive financing
Exhibitors from six countries shared experiences related to:
- Digital transformation and the massification of agricultural credit.
- Financial products, analysis technologies and agricultural credit distribution channels.
- Financing models with technical assistance.
- State financial instruments for productive credit.
“I Believe that the experience of other financial entities, as well as MOCCA´s is very interesting; they provide technical assistance and help connect a producer with the markets, since this link in the chain facilitates determining when producers will be receiving payments. There is greater communication and therefore risks are mitigated facilitating access to credit for producers,” said Vilma Perez, from the Management of Productive Chains of Fundación Génesis Empresarial, a financier in Guatemala who established a strategic alliance with MOCCA in 2019.
“The reflections of the regional meeting of MOCCA’s financial allies provide us with a horizon for the construction of different mechanisms to facilitate access to financing in our countries. As we make progress in financial inclusion, we can have an impact on people’s economic opportunities and poverty reduction,” said Daniel Castillo, Executive Vice President of BANADESA, Honduras.
About MOCCA’s financing program
MOCCA promotes and facilitates access to financing for coffee and cocoa producers who are beneficiaries of the project, especially to invest in renovation and rehabilitation (R&R), through partnerships with financial institutions, promoting short, medium and long-term financial products tailored to the needs of producers. Since 2019 and through more than 20 alliances in Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, MOCCA’s financial allies have placed more than US$68 million in productive loans to 15,800 producers.
“We have obtained benefits, for example in this case, MOCCA supported me with this plot, through BECAMO and with the financing I obtained 700 plants to renovate my plot.”
Melvin Aguilar
Coffee producer
Ocotepeque, Honduras
“With MOCCA we not only worked on agronomy, which is coffee cultivation, but the project also encouraged producers to access credit. We are grateful to MOCCA because (the program) provided a person to take care of all the pending matters and submit the applications to Agrobanco, a government financial institution that offers lower, more accessible and payable interest rates for the producer. This made it possible to obtain 150 loans for the producers in the Cooperative and the beneficiaries, of course, are happy,” said Luis Villegas, coffee producer and President of the UNICAFEC Cooperative in Jaén, Peru.
