The Central Bank of Nigeria has disclosed that it has disbursed a total of N756.51 billion to over 3.7 million farmers under the Anchor Borrower’s Programme since inception in 2015.
The apex bank revealed this in its communiqué no. 137 of the Monetary Policy Committee meeting released on Tuesday.
The President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, had in 2015, launched the ABP in a bid to boost agricultural production and reverse Nigeria’s negative balance of payments on food.
Beneficiaries of this programme include farmers cultivating cereals (rice, maize, wheat etc.) cotton, roots and tubers, sugarcane, tree crops, legumes, tomatoes and livestock.
Loans are disbursed to the beneficiary farmers through deposit money banks, development finance institutions and microfinance banks, which the programme recognised as participating financial institutions.
The communiqué read, “Under the bank’s development finance initiatives, the bank granted N756.51billion to 3,734,938 smallholder farmers cultivating 4.6 million hectares of land, of which N120.24billion was extended for the 2021 wet season to 627,051 farmers for 847,484 hectares of land, under the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme.”
The CBN also stated that so far, the sum of N121.57billionn has been disbursed to 32,617 beneficiaries under its Agribusiness, Small and Medium Enterprise Investment Scheme, an initiative introduced in February 2017 by the MPC.