In partnership with the Initiative for Smallholder Finance, the Rural and Agricultural Finance Learning Lab released of a new landmark study, Inflection Point: Unlocking Growth in the Era of Farmer Finance. Following decades of more singular approaches to providing smallholder farmers with financial services, the smallholder finance industry is now marked by a more diverse set of actors – financial service providers, funders, market and research platforms, and technical assistance providers – yielding new approaches to collaboration and greater access to information and technology than ever before.

Their new study builds on Dalberg's 2012 Catalyzing Smallholder Agricultural Finance.  It provides a sophisticated picture of how the smallholder finance space currently operates by describing the key actors and the nature of their interactions, and conceptualizing these in a new "industry model."  The study identifies market frictions across the major components of the “industry model” that continue to inhibit smallholder farmers’ access to financial services and opportunities for removing them, and rallies sector actors around the need for more collective action than ever before.