1.4 Outline

repayment schedules aligned with their (seasonal) cash-flows, at least quarterly instead of monthly repayments. Noteworthy, the insurance sector appears to be more advanced, with a choice of agricultural insurance products available. Finally, the study argues that some of these predicaments could be addressed by banks easily. For a comprehensive response and harnessing opportunities, the FIs need to create dedicated strategies for agrifinance and SME-finance. Hardly any of them have done so, though there are nuanced differences between public and private FIs.

1.4 Outline

The field study presented here is organised as follows: Chapter 2 explains the approach. Section 2.1 presents the research questions that the study seeks to answer, and the research design applied. Section 2.2 shows how the design was realised, i. e. who was interviewed when and (in case of SMEs) where. Section 2.3 defines the key concepts applied in this study. Chapters 3 and 4 and present the findings from the field. We show the status of SMEs’ access to finance, and of agrifinance related products offered by FIs. Then we qualify the demand- and supplyside barriers through the data and information collected from agricultural SMEs on the demand side and FIs on the supply side. We highlight feedback on a few policy barriers, though they are not the focus of this study. Chapter 5 presents recommendations and proposed interventions to showcase opportunities to tackle identified barriers to access to finance of agri SMEs in Ethiopia.