NIRSAL Facilitates Over N148 Billion In Finance For Agricbusiness

Posted by Tolulope Ogugua Business News, Featured, Latest Headlines Thursday, February 18th, 2021

Photo: Managing Director/CEO NIRSAL, Mr Aliyu Abdulhameed

(AFRICAN EXAMINER) – The Nigeria Incentives- Based Risk Sharing System For Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) has stated that it has helped in providing over N148 billion in finance and investments for agriculture and agribusiness.

The Managing Director of NIRSAL, Mr Aliyu Abdulhameed disclosed this in Lagos on Thursday in a chat with online news media.

He added that the agency has aggregated over 3,000 agro geo-cooperatives with 500,000 farmers on nearly 800,000 hectares of land.

NIRSAL also enrolled 1.4 million persons onto innovative insurance products designed in collaboration with a consortium of agricultural insurance underwriters.

According to him, NIRSAL has grown its balance sheet to N140billion, equity by 1,415% and total assets by 87%. Also, the number of farmers they have worked with has also grown, due to their Agro Geo-Cooperative model.

“In the course of the last 13 months, we facilitated the flow of over NGN30billion into agricultural value chains from commercial banks and other sources. Even though our operations suffered a stall during the lockdown of 2020, our technological depth gave us a pathway to return to work while remaining safe and socially-distanced

“We have also been up to some high-level advocacy. To curb the dismal levels of post-harvest losses that Nigeria suffers, and create efficient routes for commodity movement and storage, we are engaging with and supporting the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment in the development of a policy on Secured Agricultural Commodity Transport and Storage Corridors (SATS-C).

“While pursuing our mandate that translates to positively impacting Nigeria’s economy, we have been building a world class corporate entity too.

“In the past year, we further improved NIRSAL’s structure and systems, maintained compliance with the International Financial Reporting Standards and successfully implemented the Balanced Scorecard performance management approach to tap the best from our talented employees.” The MD stated.