Uganda Rural Support for Private Enterprise
Uganda Rural Support for Private Enterprise Expansion and Development (Rural SPEED)
USAID
The objective of Rural SPEED was to deepen and strengthen Uganda’s financial sector in response to this rural enterprise demand for financial services. Increased provision of financial services leveraged investment and business activity to complement other Mission programs in rural areas. The resulting increase in economic activity helped Uganda to achieve the economic growth rates proposed in PEAP. Rural SPEED was engaged in four key activity areas: 1) savings mobilization; 2) service delivery mechanisms; 3) agriculture finance and 4) new product delivery.
JAA provided a rural finance specialist to complete the financial mapping of the supply chain of three major marketed commodities: cotton, maize, and sunflower. These maps were provided to financial institutions as tools to demystify the risks and costs along the entire commodity supply chain and thus facilitate the introduction of viable and sustainable agriculture finance products primarily in rural areas.
Specifically, JAA’s advisor: (1) made field visits to visualize and understand the nature and flow of the supply chain for the three crops in question, which included interviewing and discussing with various entities involved at the various stages of the supply chain for the identified commodities, including inputs and equipment suppliers, producer and production support organizations, processing and marketing entities, and selected financial institutions undertaking agricultural lending; (2) reviewed data on existing production costs under prudent crop husbandry practices and existing market trends; (3) carried out a detailed analysis of the activities and costs involved in the entire commodity supply chain of each of the identified crops; (4) prepared supply chain financial maps in the form of Excel spreadsheets for the respective commodities; (5) developed a narrative outlining specific potential financial risks at each stage/level of the supply chain with proposed possible risk mitigation measures for each of financial risk outlined to accompany the spreadsheets; and (6) presented the draft financial maps at a roundtable for selected financial institutions.