Mobilising internal finance - How forest and farm producer organisations upscale financial access

The objective of the report is to shed light on the potential of FFPOs’ capacity to mobilise internal finance to scale, to offer practical insights from a series of case studies covering six countries, and to provide a set of recommendations. [...] 1 The Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) is a partnership between the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and AgriCord. [...] Recognising the importance of these financial groups and the contribution they make to the household and community finance, many development organisations have collected research on practices and approaches from around the world to build standard models and train groups on how to adopt them (Rippey and Fowler 2011). [...] There are also many variables that can influence the different outcomes of financial service linkages beyond the type of linkages, such as the information that the groups receive about the linkage, and the orientation of the formal financial provider, among others. [...] The former is the case of Santa Anita, the savings and credit cooperative of the Union of Peasant and Indigenous Organisations of Cotacachi (UNORCAC) that joined the Federation of Savings and Credit Cooperatives of Ecuador (FECOAC) to leverage opportunities for complementarity, exchange services, and knowledge, and to apply shared strategies to maximise impact (see Section 3.4).