Sana Kisan to support poor farmers in reconstruction

Kathmandu, June 30: Sana Kisan Bikas Bank Limited (SKBBL) has launched a programme to distribute concessional loan of Rs. 50,000 each to as many as 12,000 severely affected rural smallholder poor households.

Such households will be provided credit at a rate of 5 per cent interest through Small Farmers Agriculture Cooperatives Limiteds (SFACLs) in Dhading, Nuwakot and Rasuwa.

In order to restore livelihood of smallholder rural poor farmers, SKBBL has launched ‘Livelihood Restoration Credit for Earthquake Affected Communities' programme with the support of the Asian Development Bank.

The project has got US$ 5.5 million loan from the government out of the grant provided by the ADB for the purpose of providing Livelihood Restoration Credit Disbursement.

“Besides the loan disbursement to the farmers, community based capacity building and training programme will be conducted for the restoration of earthquake affected communities of rural smallholder farmers in all 14 districts which were severely affected by the quake,” said Jalan Kumar Sharma, chief executive officer of the bank.

Under this programme, 2,400 rural poor farmers will be trained in disaster resilient construction and disaster risk management capacity development. Approximately 1.5 million USD has been allocated for the training purpose.

The bank Wednesday handed over cheques worth Rs. 190 million to 20 SFACLs of Dhading, Nuwakot and Rasuwa districts for re-lending the money to 4,418 rural farmers.

According to Khem Bahadur Pathak, chairman of SKBBL, altogether 756 SFACLs including in the process of hand over were undertaking microfinance activities reaching approximately 550,000 rural poor households.

These cooperatives have a total loan outstanding of about Rs. 28 billion including Rs. 10.50 billion loan from SKBBL.

Joint Secretary of Ministry of Finance Surya Prasad Acharya said that about one third of the total household members of the AFACLs affiliated with SKBBL were largely affected by the devastating earthquake in April and May last year.

ADB country director Kenichi Yokoyama informed that the loan facility was to help families restore their houses, farmland, livestock, or micro-enterprises. “The concessional micro-credit is targeted to particularly poor and vulnerable households that have no alternative sources of financial assistance.”

About 31,832 residences of the members have been fully damaged and more than 79,000 cattle died in the tremors.

ont-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>An exhibition of the social enterprises is being organized on the sidelines of the conference where about 30 practitioners have been participating.

A study on the state and profile of social enterprises and social entrepreneurship in Nepal was presented in the conference.

The report was presented by Chittaranjan Pandey and Upasna Acharya from the King's research wing, and has been supported by Social Enterprise Activation Centre (Korea), Korean International Cooperation Agency and Work Together Foundation.

The study concluded that there was male and Newar dominance in entrepreneurship in the Kathmandu Valley which started from 1965 and younger population below 40 years of age were largely in enterprise creation.

The study has shown that the government support is very minimal in spite of the fact that there was a strong potential for the social enterprises to help solve problems associated with agriculture, education, health, unemployment and poverty.

The study recommended that the government should identify social enterprise as a separate entity like public or private enterprises with the support of banks and financial institutions coming in.

“Special training packages needed to be developed for the impact based Lean Canvas Business Model and business plan preparation,” read the report.