Acquisition of Grant for New Project from IFAD

• APRACA recently obtained a grant from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) for a new project titled “Project to Document Global Best Practices on Sustainable Models of Pro-Poor Rural Financial Services in Developing Countries”. The four-year project starting from January 2014 with a budget of US$ 1.1 million would be implemented in five participating member countries of APRACA including China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. The project aimed to document pertinent cases of global best practices which could be used by the countries on the respective thematic areas identified/suggested by them as follows:  (a) Improved financial service delivery for China; (b) Enhanced agricultural value chain finance strategies for India; (c) Agricultural insurance for Indonesia; (c) Remittances related to agriculture and fisheries for the Philippines; and (e) Improved risk management strategies and tools for Thailand.
• In accordance with the Project implementation schedule, APRACA has taken measures to recruit a Project Manager who is expected to start working from early March 2014.   APRACA also plans to organize an inception workshop for the Project in the second week of April 2014, where all the member institutions of APRACA in the target countries and other stakeholders will be invited to attend.

Launch of APRACA Quarterly Newsletter

On 20 January 2014, APRACA launched the first issue of its new quarterly newsletter which will play both a complementary and a supplementary role to its existing website in supporting the information dissemination and exchange as well as knowledge sharing.  Importantly, it will help contribute to further development and growth of both the Association and its members through mutual cooperation and support.  To support the circulation of the newsletter, it recently installed a new automatic back-end system on the APRACA website for automatically distributing its newsletter to the member institutions.