The eight years of work done on improving credit to farmers in Haiti have paid off. Today, agricultural financing is available in all regions of Haiti and 3,600 farming families have signed up for crop insurance in the Artibonite region. The SYFAAH project is a success story!
Launched in 2011 by a consortium formed by Développement international Desjardins (DID),the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and SOCODEVI, the SYFAAH project has helped lay the foundation for a national agricultural financing and insurance system in Haiti. Structuring the offer of financial services to agri-entrepreneurs, providing technical support for plots of farm land and introducing crop insurance are the pillars of the strategy for the project team’s work.
“It was an ambitious plan considering that we faced the challenge of professionalizing the financial institutions and adapting their service offerings to the realities of the agricultural world. Knowing the Haitian context, the progress that has been made is impressive. The support work carried out by the project teams was colossal and today five financial institutions offer adapted agricultural credit through 72 service points across all 10 regions of the country!”.
RAYMOND BOUTIN
Program Manager at SOCODEVI
Managing agricultural production risks by offering crop insurance to farming families has proven to be a successful experience and a real innovation in Haiti.
“The pilot phase in the Artibonite region was an opportunity to use this tool to mitigate natural and climatic risks and to encourage families to register for the program. Crop insurance is totally new to these people, so a lot of outreach work was needed. Now, close to 40% of farmers involved in this phase of the project consider access to crop insurance as an incentive to increasing their production, which is promising”.
RAYMOND BOUTIN
Program Manager at SOCODEVI
Concrete benefits for Haitian farmers
- 5 financial institutions dedicated to supplying adapted agricultural credit are now present across the country.
- More than 80,000 loans have been granted to agri-entrepreneurs for a total of $86 million CAD.
- 3,600 rice producers have benefitted from crop insurance for a total insured value of more than $2 million CAD.
- The production practises of more than 4,000 producing families improved through technical support from the project.
The SYFAAH project was made possible through financial support from the governments of Canada and Switzerland, as well as the French Development Agency and the Ministry of Agriculture, National Resources and Rural Development of Haiti.