The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Thursday said it would fund the value chains of nine agricultural commodities with N432 billion during the 2020 wet planting season.
The apex bank listed the commodities as tomato, poultry, rice, oil palm, cotton, maize, fish, cocoa and livestock/dairy.
Top officials of the CBN unveiled the plan at a stakeholders’ meeting held to review the progress recorded in the bank’s Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP) and the strategies for the 2020 wet season.
This is coming on the heels of the CBN’s promise to issue a framework for the harmonisation of non-interest window in all its intervention programmes.
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It identified ABP and the Targeted Credit Facility (TCF), aimed at supporting households and Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises affected by the coronavirus pandemic, as the core programmes being considered under the framework.
Yila Yusuf, Director of Development Finance at CBN, stated that N432 billion would be disbursed through the designated participating, adding that more than 1.1 million farmers, cultivating over one million hectares of farmland, were expected to benefit from the loans.
According to him, the loans would help produce a total output of 8.3 million metric tonnes of commodities.
“The bank’s funding of the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme for the 2020 season is the highest since the inception of the programme in 2015,” he said.
Isaac Okorafor, CBN’s Director of Corporate Communications, said the creation of the non-interest window was a response to calls by concerned stakeholders to be concerned for funding under the programme.
He disclosed that the CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, had directed the Development Finance Department of the bank and the NIRSAL Microfinance Bank to speed up the approval process of TCF loans to help restore businesses and livelihoods.
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