Enhancing Farmers Financial Management Skills
Populations in rural regions, both farm enterprises as well as small farm households need better access to effective financial services. One way to tackle this may be to identify the policies, structures and procedures which would help to ensure that rural households, largely dependent on farming, have better access to effective financial services. On the one hand this could mean increasing or adapting the type of financial services offered.
On the other hand it could mean helping the people in the households to have the confidence and skills to access the services that are already available. If farming families are more familiar with the requirements of formal financial institutions, can supply the right kind of information to them, have the right attitude to contractual agreements and can monitor money as it is acquired and spent by the family, then they become more attractive potential clients of the formal financial sector.
In fact, what is lacking among rural populations are skills such as better literacy, better analytical skills, better understanding of enterprises, better awareness of goals, better budgeting, better management of savings, and better knowledge about financial services. Commanding these skills more effectively would enable people in rural regions to approach and make more effective use of available financial services. This can be achieved even among people with low levels of literacy as experiences have shown.
Key actors in bringing about these improvements are governments, non-governmental organisations and financial institutions. Recommendations regarding the policy measures, actions and scope for co-operation that each one of these key actors can implement in their endeavours to improve conditions in rural finance may be found in the document "Enhancing Farmers' Financial Management Skills" here.
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strengthening
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locational
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intangible
factors for firms
intangible
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