Financial instruments
(FIS)

Financial Instruments (FIS) is a new service area proposed by SERVIR West Africa for 2022-2027 to build EO services that leverage stakeholders’ access to financial resources across a variety of economic sectors. For example, increasing the availability, accessibility, and affordability of external inputs is key to increase crop productivity and meet food security objectives in a context of unprecedented population growth. When capital is limited, credit is required to procure these external inputs. It is also known that access to (micro)-financial services helps improve living standards, which can help reduce inequality. Recently, inclusive finance has received increased attention to provide useful and appropriate financial products and services such as transactions, payments, savings, credit, insurance, pensions, etc. at an affordable cost.

EO has reached a level of maturity where it can potently leverage financial service penetration to customers until now considered non-bankable. It can support the development of more granular and transparent data ecosystems to help quantify risk, score creditworthiness, monitor practice, portfolio and verify compliance. Reducing cash-out exposure in lenders will help growth the customer base, reduce operational costs, and must be allowed to trickle down to the borrowers through reduced premiums, interest rates and improved trust in formal financial services. This effort will benefit from the support of IRI at Columbia University as a regional hub member. The FIS service area is led by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).