Agricultural & Rural Finance
Agriculture and Rural Finance Theme
FSDT seeks to facilitate “more and better financial services” to where a vast majority of Tanzanians are employed and located. This includes diagnosis of the barriers to agriculture and rural finance transactions and working with a broad range of partners to implement interventions that address the constraints and unlock access, usage, quality, and welfare of financial services.
Agriculture Finance
FSDT looks at the transactions between the agriculture sector and its usage and depth of usage of financial products and services and the resultant contribution to improved productivity. Theme interventions are designed to deepen the financial sector contribution to sector development and farmer welfare improvement.
Rural Finance
The need to ease transactions between rural persons and enterprises and increase access, usage, and experience of financial services and products drive FSDT to push for interventions that will catalyze and improve these dimensions of financial inclusion for rural persons and enterprises. Improved user experiences and improved quality of financial services and products are integral to growth of rural finance as they are the key drivers for new demand for access and usage for financial services and improved welfare.
Projects
Mwanamke Mwezeshe
Working with the Wanawake na Maendeleo Foundation (WAMA), FSDT funded technical assistance to implement Community Based Savings Groups in the form of Village Savings and Loans (VSLs) in four districts in Lindi Region in ordert o bring sustainable financial services to rural poor.
Boresha Maisha
The Aga Khan Foundation facilitates the Boresha Maisha project in Mtwara and Lindi. These regions have the least access and usage of financial services in Tanzania. The project involves the formation of Community Based Savings Groups (CBSGs). By December 2014, the project was working with 8,259 groups and total CBSG membership was 159,277 of which 66% were women.
Vision Fund
FSDT supported SEDA, a micro credit NGO based in Arusha, in the northern part of Tanzania, to transform to a microfinance company (MFC) limited by shares. FSDT’s support was used to upgrade SEDA’s MIS system, training of staff, and improving the branch infrastructure. FSDT also funded technical assistance on legal, taxation, marketing, products design and re-branding, after a successful transformation process SEDA is now known as VisionFund Tanzania Microfinance Company Limited and has been licensed by the Bank of Tanzania to accept deposits.
YOSEFO
YOSEFO is a microfinance institution which client focus on youth and women. FSDT supported YOSEFO to expand the outreach of its microfinance program. The target was to increase YOSEFO’s client base from 15,000 to 61,000 clients and 40,000 mobile banking users. The project also aimed to increase the capacity of YOSEFO for outreach and sustainable delivery of financial service. YOSEFO is also in the process of transforming into a deposit-taking microfinance institution and will be known as Yetu Microfinance Bank.
