Lack of access to finance is a major constraint to unlocking the potential of agriculture in Africa. Despite the economic positive growth witnessed by many countries in the last decade, averaging over 5% annually, the agriculture sector continues to lag behind in many countries. While the commercial finance sector has been rapidly growing, the agricultural sector continues to receive less than this share of total lending. For example, less than 1% of the total commercial lending in Tanzania goes to agriculture and in Kenya, the share of total lending to agriculture has declined from 5% to 3% over the past few years. In West Africa Monetary and Economic Union less than 3% of total commercial bank lending goes into agriculture—yet in many of these countries and regions agriculture accounts for between 50% and 70% of the GDP. While increased ODA will continue to be needed to meet development financing gap to achieve the green revolution in Africa, huge opportunities exist to leverage a significant share of this amount from local financial markets. While there exists significant excess financial liquidity in local financial institutions, commercial banks do not lend to agriculture for several reasons. These include the high dispersion of farmers, which increase lending and recollection costs; high level of covariate risks as farmers in a given location are often subject to the same sets of risks—both climatic and price; lack of acceptable collaterals by applicants; seasonality and low profitability of smallholder agriculture; lack of risk-mitigating instruments to lower risk of lending to poor farmers; and high costs of borrowing money on capital markets, which leads to higher interest rate charges for farmers.