To: 13/07/2016

Location: Nairobi, Kenya

The African Development Bank Group will host a workshop on "Establishing an African Agriculture Risk Sharing and Financing Mechanism" in Nairobi, Kenya, from 12-13 July 2016.

The AfDB seeks to partner with African governments and financial institutions to design an innovative mechanism which will facilitate increase in financing to agriculture. This will be through de-risking agriculture value chains, reducing transaction costs and unlocking financial flows into the agriculture sector at scale across the continent.

The workshop will be an opportunity for key stakeholders to contribute to the proposed facility's modalities for sharing risks around financing agriculture value chains. The workshop will also present global and Africa-wide lessons learned and best practices in the design of a workable, context-based mechanism for the continent.

The workshop will bring together policy makers, including senior officials of Ministries of Finance, Agriculture, Central Banks, commercial banks and other financial institutions, development partners, among others, in order to:

i. Exchange knowledge and experiences on successful agriculture risk sharing mechanisms across Africa;

ii. Build a consensus on the conceptual framework on Risk Sharing;

iii. Present AfDB's thoughts on the Risk Sharing and Financing Mechanism, its preliminary design elements, and get feedback from the audience;

iv. Articulate the expected roles of AfDB and stakeholders in the design and management of the Risk Sharing Facility, alongside public, private and institutional partners to operationalise the risk sharing mechanism.