The Support to Agricultural Revitalization and Transformation (START) facility inaugurated its management board on September 28, 2018 and elected Ms. Patricia Ojangole, Managing Director of the Uganda Development Bank (UDBL) as its chairperson for the year 2018/2019. “We are very pleased to be led by a woman member of the Board and we have full confidence in Patricia’s leadership and vision for the START facility,” commented Dr. Dmitry Pozhidaev, Head of the UNCDF Office in Uganda.

The Board is responsible for the overall oversight and direction of the START facility and is made up of three institutional members: United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), Private Sector Foundation Uganda (PSFU), Uganda Development Bank Limited (UDBL), two independent members and an observer from the European Union Delegation. The Board members are bound by ethics guidelines and signed a conflict of interest declaration to ensure transparency and accountability during their tenure during a ceremony that concluded the Board meeting and was witnessed by media.

The START facility offers technical assistance and concessional finance to agribusiness SMEs in Northern Uganda. It launched its first call for proposals in May 2018. Sensitization meetings were held in the five sub-regions of Northern Uganda to allow project developers an opportunity to raise questions and for partners to provide guidance on how to prepare proposals to increase the probability of meeting the eligibility and selection criteria. These launches attracted over 1,120 potential prospects and business enterprises.

As a result PSFU received a total of 342 proposals, resulting in 31 long-listed projects that were handed over to UNCDF. UNCDF will screen and appraise these projects to identify the final pipeline for development. According to Gideon Badagawa, PSFU Executive Director, the facility used a clear set of criteria to pre-identify eligible projects: “First, the businesses must be registered and recognised and focusing on adding value to agriculture through storage or processing. The project must also have 1/4 of the proposed finances while UNCDF provides the 3/4 of the financing and of course it must be in Northern Uganda.” The long-listed projects cover a number of priority value chains, particularly in apiary, cassava, maize and rice.

In her remarks, Ms. Ojangole committed to working together with the other board members to ensure the START facility is able to support as many people as possible. “For the start, we have €4m but we expect to leverage up to €8m through private sector financing and financial support from development banks,” she said.

This will be made possible through partnerships with other potential funders, corporates and agencies. The goal is to transform the facility into a nationally-owned sustainable and adequately capitalized loan/grant facility to support small and medium-sized value adding agribusinesses with the further intention to scale up its operation and coverage nationally.

The START facility aims to address the “middle missing’’ gap in agricultural financing by providing low interest loans at 10-12 percent interest rate with a grace period of five years for agricultural value addition activities. “The fund is targeting projects that have a financing need of Shs 40m to Shs 400m. With the current high interest rate in the commercial banks of over 20 percent, these businesses have not been having an alternative source of credit and we hope this will help,” said Gideon Badagawa, PSFU Executive Director.

The START facility is being implemented by the three participating institutions (PSFU, UNCDF and UDBL) as part of the Development Initiative for Northern Uganda (DINU), a Government of Uganda project overseen by the Office of the Prime Minister and financed by the European Union.