Posted by : The Caspian Debt Team Caspian organises Workshop on Financial Access, Business Development and Institutional Excellence for Member Institutions of Fairtrade Network of Asia Pacific Producers (FT NAPP)
Caspian Impact Investments (CII), makes loans to companies that result in positive social and environmental impact. Fairtrade certified companies make an active commitment towards better supply chains and hence are of great interest to Caspian. Caspian has had the experience of working with Fairtrade certified companies, one of them being a part of the portfolio of Fairtrade Network of Asia Pacific Producers (FT NAPP). Conversations with FT NAPP indicated that most of their member institutions had difficulty accessing credit. Given Caspian’s focus on building a strong and sustainable food & agribusiness ecosystem, we offered our support to FT NAPP and jointly organised a workshop for the member institutions of FT NAPP.
The one-day Workshop on Financial Access, Business Development and Institutional Excellence for Member Institutions of Fairtrade Network of Asia Pacific Producers was held on 30 November 2017 in Bangalore. Over 20 member institutions from various parts of India & engaged in a variety of activities participated in this workshop.
The core theme of the Workshop was identifying the credit needs of the producer organization, identifying key challenges and helping small producer organisations (SPOs) address these challenges. Our colleagues Emmanuel and Ravinder facilitated the workshop.
Caspian’s role in the program spread across from designing of the program/content, identification of external resource personnel, to moderation and delivery of the overall program.
We invited NABKISAN & SAMUNNATI, specialized NBFCs in food and agriculture value chain space. As a result, the participating member organisations could interact with three different lending institutions under one roof, at the same time. The NBFCs spoke about their product offerings which are suited to SPOs. Further, Dr. Tagat CGM NABARD (Retd) spoke about various schemes of NABARD & how a producer organization can access them. Lawcept, a law firm that works exclusively with smaller institutions & start-ups was invited to create awareness about legal aspects and regulatory compliances.
As a follow-on to the workshop, Caspian will facilitate access to credit for some of the institutions. While FT NAPP has set a modest target of facilitating credit linkage to atleast 3 SPOs, our endeavor will be to continue supporting the member institutions of FT-NAPP on an on-going basis with guidance, networking and credit linkage through Caspian & other lending institutions.