New Tech to Raise Rwanda’s Agriculture Investment

By Elias Hakizimana.

Investment in Agriculture is expected to top up from current 5 percent due to new technological tool launched by the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources (MINAGRI) in partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Dubbed ‘RuralInvest’, the tool will be useful to prepare and learn new projects based in Agriculture and Livestock farming and will ease the process to access to finance in banks.

It was revealed that most of investors in agribusiness fail to get loans as their projects are not well designed.

Dr Patrick Karangwa, the Director General of Rwanda Agriculture Board (RAB) said that the technology will complement the nationals fourth Strategic Plan for Agri

culture Transformation (PSTA4) in making agriculture investment quite double by 2024. 

“This tool is useful to boot the preparation of business plans and to sustain goals of your projects, in agriculture, and in livestock farming, when a project is well designed, it is easy to get access to loans, it is a technology that helps in financial calculation and Rwanda is among the six pilot countries.,” Karangwa said.

Karangwa noted that the technology will help raise investment in agriculture in Rwanda as it is still at 5 percent comparing to other countries.

“Sometimes investment for some people is low as financial capacity of new investors is not enough, so, the technology will help to boost capacity of projects and attract banks to fund them,” he added.

Different people are being trained on how the technology work and among them are people who currently work in agriculture and livestock farming projects, entrepreneurs and youth.

Desire Bimenyande, coordinator of the Post-harvest and Agribusiness Support Project (PASP) in Kayonza District reiterated that the training on Rural Invest technology will help to identify challenges farmers still face by collecting information from smallholder farmers.

“We will make sure the assessment done responds to the challenges farmers face by using the loans from banks. The technology has a great role for both farmers and banks as funders of projects,” Bimenyande told the media during an interview.

The technology that is in a form of software has three main parts: the first is to assess existing challenges among smallholder farmers with beneficiaries’ interventions, second part is to prepare a project while the third part is all about project evaluation.

Gualbert Gbehounou, FAO representative in Rwanda reiterated that one of the reasons why farmers in Africa in general including Rwanda are not easily having access to finance is that their projects are considered not appropriately developed.

“We want farmers to make money and become rich, it means that we have to increase investments in agriculture sector by going to banks and get loans,” he said, adding that “this is not only for Rwanda, it is general in most developing countries, FAO has decided to do something about it to improve the quality of project proposals in agriculture sector,”

“This Rural Invest toolkit is exactly one of the toolkits that farmers need, it is easy to use, you just need to introduce the data and it calculates for you the critical indicators that you need to assess your project, so, if you use it, not only you will be able to follow on your business properly if it is your own money, but in addition, you can go in a bank and you get easily a loan for that,” Gbehounou noted.

He said that the initiative targets farmers especially youth in Agriculture sector and wants to improve ICT for agriculture to make life easy.

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