In 2018, advisory services throughout the country received compensation for the services provided to only 24 households. Obviously, consulting services are not popular enough among farmers. Therefore, the public association "Agrofincenter" was created in May 2019, so that the format of consulting becomes attractive for the farmer. How does this format work?
The specialists of the Agrofincenter have concentrated on solving the urgent challenge for small agrarians: how to find funds for the development of the farm? The team also includes specialists from the USAID "ARDS" project and developers of digital products for farmers from the company "AgriAnalytica".
Every day farmer can visit the Agrofincenter for an individual consultation. Experts show how to find the right state support program, bank, grant and investment financing. To provide this, the consultants use the online platform Agrarian`s Cabinet from "AgriAnalytica", on which the application and documents to the selected financial institution or lender can be submitted online! During the working period, the team of the Agrofinance Center has held about 550 such individual consultations.
Also, consultants regularly conduct trainings on the use of AgriAnalytica digital programs for accounting or a business plan. Part of the training must be allotted to individual work with interested participants - so the consultants helped to draw up 102 business plans during the trainings and even once submitted an application to the bank in the amount of 700 000 UAH with the participant.
All consultations and trainings are free for members of the PA "Agrofincenter". The investment model of the association implies that the participants take the initiative “from below” - means they pay a membership fee. However, these funds are not sent to the central Kiev branch, but remain in the regions. Thus, participants in each region see what their contributions are spent on - a conference room, regular trainings, professional consultants, new digital developments in the Agrarian`s Cabinetand partnership agreements with lenders. The task of the central office, on the contrary, is to distribute all the funds raised from donor projects at district levels.
Whether the format of the work of such a public association has become effective can be understood from the results of our work for six months. 90 mln UAH - this is the total amount of loans that farmers received by submitting applications through the Agrarian`s Cabinet with the help of consultants from the Agrofincenter.
