[2019 Sunhak Peace Prize Laureate] African farmers were bankable
Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, the President of African Development Bank
I don’t have an interest in small things. I have an interest in big things.
And when I got to Rockefeller Foundation, we had a technology that was called “tissue culture banana,” which is a technology that allowed you to increase the yield of bananas from about 14 tons per hectare to about 40 tons per hectare.
But, the problem was, it will cost you a dollar fifty cents. And I went to my boss at the Rockefeller Foundation.
I asked him “give me five hundred thousand dollars to go and do an experiment.”
And he agreed to do the experiment in Uganda. So, I went to Uganda and went to this bank and I said “well, look, here’s five hundred thousand dollars, put it on your balance sheet but lend it to poor farmers. If it works and if they pay your money back, now here’s the deal, next year, you are going to have to put one million dollars of your own money.”
So, they went and lent it, and the farmers paid back. So, the next year, the bank put in million dollars of their money.
Four years after, the Rockefeller Foundation did an evaluation of that experiment. You know what they found out? They found out that the bank had lent 20 million dollars of their own money.
So, that sends a very important message, that African farmers were bankable, and that we needed to find a way to get commercial banks to lend to them.
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