Many of the increasing group of urban dwellers living around the poverty line are (informal) micro-entrepreneurs, involved in a diversity of activities such as shop-keeping, waste collection and recycling, trading, transport and farming. These entrepreneurs require access to working capital for the maintenance of their investment and for its potential expansion. Urban agriculture is increasingly recognised as a vehicle for the development of more productive, sustainable and inclusive or democratic cities, but most of these urban agricultural producers face limited access to credit and investment schemes.
Financing Urban Agriculture was announced already early 2002 as an forthcoming theme for the Urban Agriculture Magazine. In 2002, UN Habitat, through its Urban Economy and Finance Branch (at Headquarters in Nairobi) and its Urban Management Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean (UMP-LAC), together with the IDRC (International Development Research Centre, Canada) supported an initiative of documenting and analysing several case studies on credit and investment for urban agriculture. This initiative was further supported with additional cases by RUAF. Some of these cases are described in Urban Agriculture Magazine no. 7 (e.g. the Kenya and Harare cases).
Also available in Portuguese, Spanish and French.
Contents:
- Boxes on Matto Grosso do Sul, Tontines and Khartoum
- The Marketing Manager in Ghana
- Micro-credits for small producers in Argentina
- Social policy or an unheard claim: the case of Texcoco, Mexico
- Credit and investment in Urban Agriculture in Nepal
- Focusing credit on Urban Agriculture in Gaborone, Botswana
- HOPCOMS: a Success Story of Horticultural Co-operative Marketing
- Financing Urban Agriculture in London with special reference to City Farms
- Securing Funds through Municipal Participatory Budgets: the experience of Porto Alegre, Brazil
- Financing Market-Oriented Dairy Development: the case of Ada’a-Liben Woreda Dairy Association, Ethiopia
- Micro-credit and investment for urban gardening in St Petersburg, Russia
- Economic Strategies of Different Cropping Systems in West Africa
- Micro-credit for Urban Agricultural activities in Bulgaria
- Investment in Urban Agriculture to Reduce Urban Poverty in The Philippines
- Using City Compost for Urban Farming in India
- Formal and Informal Financial Services
- Periurban Agriculture Development in China: a New Approach in Xiaotangshan, Beijing
