- GIRSAL Calls for Cheaper Farm Credit as Technical Gaps Keep Smallholders Outside Formal Finance
Ghana’s smallholder farmers need cheaper and more accessible financing, but credit alone will not solve the sector’s persistent funding problem without stronger technical support, farmer aggregation and better links to financial institutions, according to the Ghana Incentive-Based Risk-Sharing System for Agricultural Lending.
Samuel Yeboah, Chief Operating Officer of GIRSAL Ltd, said financing programmes must be structured around the realities of small-scale agriculture rather than assume that simply making money available will cause it to reach farmers.
His comments add to a growing debate over why agriculture continues to struggle for formal financing despite its importance to jobs, food security and Ghana’s wider economy.
“I want to say that funding for smallholders in the green space should be affordable and accessible, and if we work together as partners, we can provide that,” Mr Yeboah told the Ecobank-JoyNews Financial Dialogue in Accra.
The event, held under the theme “Green Finance, Real Impact: Powering Inclusive Agri-Growth in Ghana”, brought financing and agricultural stakeholders together to examine the barriers facing farmers and agribusinesses. Mr Yeboah argued that collaboration would be essential because the constraints run beyond the price of money itself.
His warning is significant because Ghana’s broader credit environment has improved during 2026, yet access remains uneven. T
he Ghana Reference Rate fell to 10.18% in September from 10.61% in August, while average lending rates have also eased, but cheaper credit does not automatically reach borrowers that banks still consider difficult to assess or expensive to serve.
For smallholder agriculture, issues such as irregular cash flows, fragmented production, weather risk, weak records and limited collateral can remain as restrictive as high interest rates.
Mr Yeboah therefore called for agricultural finance programmes to include a strong technical-assistance component capable of improving farmers’ and agribusinesses’ ability to use capital productively.
Training can strengthen production practices, record-keeping, financial management and understanding of lender requirements, while better technical information can also help banks assess agricultural risk more accurately.
“They must be aggregated, they must be trained,” he said, arguing that banks are more likely to reach farmers when they operate through organised structures.
Aggregation is especially important because lending individually to thousands of geographically dispersed farmers can be costly for financial institutions.
Farmer groups, cooperatives, off-taker arrangements and structured value chains can create identifiable production units through which lenders can monitor performance, distribute finance and collect repayments more efficiently.
For farmers, the same structures can improve bargaining power, access to inputs and technical services while making production histories easier to document.
GIRSAL itself was established to reduce precisely these types of barriers by sharing agricultural credit risk with financial institutions and improving their capacity to assess agribusiness lending.
As of June 30, 2026, participating financial institutions had extended more than GH¢1.85bn in GIRSAL-guaranteed agricultural loans, benefiting 6,695 agribusinesses across 89 districts in 15 regions.
GIRSAL has issued guarantees worth GH¢943.42mn through its risk-sharing scheme, indicating that de-risking has already become a significant component of agricultural lending architecture.
Yet the numbers also demonstrate why the policy problem has not disappeared. Agriculture encompasses millions of farmers and a wide range of activities from crop production and livestock to aggregation, processing, storage, transport and exports, meaning formal lending still reaches only part of the potential market.
Increasing credit volumes therefore requires both more capital and better mechanisms for converting informal agricultural activity into businesses that lenders can evaluate.
GIRSAL has consequently invested in technical support not only for farmers but also for financial institutions. Its programmes train agricultural desk officers, relationship managers, risk officers and credit analysts in crop, livestock, poultry and agribusiness finance, while its technical teams support due diligence, feasibility assessment and loan structuring.
The objective is to reduce the information gap that often causes banks to treat agriculture as a single high-risk category rather than distinguish among commodities, production systems and individual borrowers.
That information problem is becoming an increasingly important part of Ghana’s agricultural-finance debate. GIRSAL argued in August that the deeper constraint may no longer be capital alone but the lack of reliable, timely data allowing lenders to measure agricultural risk accurately.
If a bank cannot estimate expected yields, production costs, weather exposure, market demand or the repayment profile of a borrower, even concessional money may fail to produce sustainable lending.
Technology is beginning to be used to narrow that gap. GIRSAL, Development Bank Ghana and Opportunity International recently launched the “Boa Mi” artificial intelligence platform, which provides farmers and extension officers with crop-specific agronomic guidance while giving loan officers agricultural portfolio information.
A pilot among rice farmers generated more than 8,500 advisory queries in three months, with the partners saying the platform would eventually cover additional commodities and local languages.
The broader policy implication is that smallholder finance needs to be built around complete value chains rather than individual loan transactions.
Financing a farmer without reliable inputs, technical advice, storage, an identified buyer or predictable repayment conditions can leave both the borrower and lender exposed, while well-structured off-take and aggregation arrangements can reduce those risks.
Banks therefore need products matched to agricultural production cycles rather than conventional monthly repayment structures designed for salaried workers and urban businesses.
Mr Yeboah’s intervention also complements concerns raised by agricultural advocates over collateral and documentation requirements that can make formal credit inaccessible before interest rates even become relevant.
Smallholder farmers may possess land, crops and viable businesses without holding the formal property documentation traditionally preferred by banks, creating a mismatch between economically productive assets and acceptable collateral. Ghana’s challenge is to build financing structures that recognise agricultural cash flows and value-chain relationships while preserving the prudential safeguards lenders require.
The stakes extend beyond farmers themselves. Ghana continues to seek greater domestic production of food and agricultural raw materials as a means of reducing import dependence, preserving foreign exchange and creating jobs, while institutions including the IFC and Development Bank Ghana are directing more attention towards agriculture and food-security value chains.
Financing therefore becomes not merely a rural-development concern but part of the country’s industrial, trade and macroeconomic strategy.
For GIRSAL, the emerging message is that affordable finance must be accompanied by the capacity to absorb it. Credit guarantees can reduce lender risk, lower borrowing barriers and encourage banks into agriculture, but farmers still need the technical knowledge, organisation and market structures that allow borrowed money to produce sustainable returns.
Ghana’s agricultural-finance challenge is therefore not simply to put more money into farming, but to build enough structure around smallholders for banks to lend with confidence and farmers to borrow without being set up to fail.
