CGAP is inviting financial service providers and agricultural businesses—including commercial banks, fintechs, agtechs, asset financers, digital platforms, food processors, and more—to apply for the second cohort of ABERA: Accelerating Business to Empower Rural Women in Agriculture.

ABERA, is a CGAP-IDH collaboration. They work with financial service providers and agricultural businesses to improve their climate resilience and that of the rural women they serve through innovations in inclusive finance and curated peer learning. ABERA now works with 5 companies – Hello Tractor in Kenya, BRAC Tanzania Finance Limited (BTFL) in Tanzania, and Sistema.bio, Samunnati, and Avanti Finance in India – and will onboard more in the next cohort. This initiative supports businesses looking to enhance their performance while delivering financial and agricultural services that improve rural women’s climate resilience.

What kind of providers should apply? Those that:

• Are medium to large financial service providers and agricultural businesses operating for at least 3 years
• Serve and/or source from at least 5,000 smallholders in Africa and/or Asia, including a significant number of rural women, and are motivated to reach more
• Commit to building climate resilience and increasing gender inclusion for their business and its customers
• Are data driven, collecting and deploying gender- and age-disaggregated data on their suppliers, customers, and staff to inform decisions and track performance
• Are comfortable sharing anonymized data with ABERA (protected by confidentiality agreements) to develop successful pilots, generate insights, and drive scale
• Commit staff time and resources to ABERA to ensure the success of pilots / scalable initiatives

Deadline: Tuesday, 22 April

Have questions? Email: abera@cgap.org