20/09/2020

DFCD invests € 200k to promote sustainable farming in Kenya

A farmer in a field.

The Dutch Fund for Climate Development (DFCD) investment committee approved on 10 September 2020,  € 212,230 grant funding for Amiran, an award-winning sustainable agricultural company based in Kenya.

Climate change brings with it more frequent extreme downpours with short spans of heavy water flow and has a severe impact on the agriculture sector. This is very evident in Kenya where the sector accounts for 65 percent of the export earnings and provides the livelihood (employment, income and food security needs) for more than 80 percent of the Kenyan population.

Amiran has been advising farmers on sustainable farming methods for decades. Its long-term goal is an ambitious one: to reshape the relationship between farming and ecosystems. It aims to move farming from being a leading consumer and polluter of water to a key contributor to healthy watersheds and reliable clean water supplies, and from being a leading consumer of fossil fuels to a producer of renewable energy.

The funding will help to build the business by assisting Project Madaraka (“Project Madaraka” or “Credit Capital Management Company” (CCMC)) to finance credit sales of agricultural inputs and equipment to commercially oriented individual, smallholder and SME farming corporations.

The grant will assist Project Madaraka to procure consultancy services and technical assistance for;

  • Mobilisation of efficient blended financial resources and fund structuring

  • Capital pool accounting and modelling (IFRS9) systems

  • Legal and tax advisory for the capital pool structuring and operation

  • Setting up back and middle offices and operational procedures for managing the capital pool, production of contracts, relevant investor documentation and record-keeping for the credit portfolio

  • Climate change adaptation, EU SIR & Insurance TA, financial resource mobilisation and capacity building

  • Preliminary environmental and social impact assessments and safeguards

Project Madaraka

Amiran Kenya launched Project Madaraka in mid-2018 as a new business unit offering farming inputs and equipment on credit to smaller-scale, commercially oriented farmers and incubated the setup of credit operations in 2019. In 2020 Amiran Kenya is executing the spin-off of Project Madaraka into a standalone, agricultural Credit Capital Management Company (“CCMC”). The CCMC will manage capital invested by climate finance investors, pooled to fund short term, medium and long term credit receivables from a range of distributors in the agriculture sector, supported by a dedicated credit management function to ensure portfolio performance. The model is replicable with various distributors and in different countries and can thus be introduced across East Africa.

Amiran’s business aligns closely with the country’s Vision 2030, Climate Change Act (2016) and strategies towards climate change adaptation. The company distributes climate and pest resilient seed varieties support sustainable intensification of agriculture including organic fertilizers, irrigation efficiency including drip irrigation equipment,  chemicals,  state of the art, climate control and water measuring technologies, greenhouses (arguably responsible for building and maintaining 90% of Kenya’s greenhouses), and improved livestock management.

Project Madaraka will be financing credit sales of Amiran’s agro-inputs and equipment with a substantial amount going into the SoKNoT(South of Kenya and North of Tanzania) landscape.

About the DFCD

The Dutch Fund for Climate and Development (DFCD) enables private sector investment in projects aimed at climate adaptation and mitigation in developing countries. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs has made available €160 million to increase the resilience of communities and ecosystems most vulnerable to climate change. The DFCD is managed by a pioneering consortium of Climate Fund Managers (CFM), Worldwide Fund for Nature Netherlands (WWF-NL) and SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, led by the Dutch Entrepreneurial Development Bank, FMO.

About Amiran Kenya

Amiran is part of the Balton CP[1] group of companies headquartered in the United Kingdom. The company, based in Kenya provides complete solutions in all of its fields of expertise in agriculture as a distributor of farm consumables and equipment. Through decades of partnership with Kenya’s growers, Amiran has become a “one stop shop” for all of Kenya’s agricultural needs in crop production.  The Balton CP group also has subsidiaries and representative offices across 7 other African countries (Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia) that provide a similar offering tailored to the needs of the respective agricultural sectors in each country. This provides an opportunity for SNV DFCD to intervene in several countries as Amiran and Project Madaraka scale up business in the region.

Amiran’s one-stop-shop model covers a wide range of agricultural inputs across many value chains and comprise (seed, chemicals, fertilizer); agricultural infrastructure (greenhouses & related climate control equipment, coldrooms, shade nets, water tanks / reservoirs), equipment (irrigation systems, farm implements, energy units including solar and biogas generating equipment etc).

To read the full disclosure document, please click here.

[1] https://www.baltoncp.com/ has subsidiaries / representative offices in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Zambia, Ghana and Nigeria