Our cooperatives economy can be enhanced through properly lending regulations with macro finance banks say Mrs Grace kikelomo of RUFIN, she spoke with food farm news on how the policy can be effectively deployed.

Can we meet you madam?

My name is Grace Kikelola, I work with Rural Finance Institution Building Programme (RUFIN) as desk officer for partnership and collaboration with the Federal Department of Cooperative (FDC), Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and apex body of National Association of Micro-Finance Institution (ANBMFI)

What is the role of RUFIN in all this?

RUFIN is the Federal Government of Nigeria and International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) funded project. The essence is to create an enabling environment for the micro finance sector to strive in a sustainable manner in the country and also to equally build capacity of practitioners which includes the Micro finance Institutions and the financial cooperatives towards being able to provide their mandated services of ensuring access to credit loan by the rural active poor in the rural communities.

If I may ask, how long has this partnership started?

We started collaboration in 2009, and since then, it has been getting better because when we started, it was not easy breaking through some bureaucracy and system that were in place as this programme is to enhance more efficient and better performance push by the involving financial Institutional agencies to do what they do to better the system and micro finance environment.

Now since 2009, how has it really affected rural villages’ cooperatives?

You know access to credit has really been a challenge as when you go to field and ask any farmer in the rural communities about access to credit. The response has always been none ability to get credit to enhance his or her business. So RUFIN has been trying to link these groups of people to financial cooperative, or micro finance banks or financial Non Governmental Organization (NGOs). However we have recorded tremendous progress with the NGOs of financial Institutions and cooperatives lending very well to these poor groups. About 80% of the active poor groups have got credit leverage as there are about 6,600 rural groups that we have captured in our data base. We are already working with Micro Finance Banks to leverage on their ability to lend to the groups. Before now all these group lack financial management of book keeping and cooperative management and also lack basic criteria on how to access finance, but now we have put many of them through on how to access the fund from micro finance Institution.

Can you throw light on issue of counterpart and states that are involved?

We have 12 states including Adamawa, Akwa-Ibom, Anambra, Bauchi, Benue, Zamfara, Kaduna, Nazarawa, Edo, Imo, Oyo and Lagos