Smallholder Agricultural Finance in Nigeria: Literature Review on The Research Gap

The aim of this paper is to first and foremost review various literatures on agricultural financing in Nigeria and study the various streams and impact of financing that are available to the smallholder farmers, and secondly, to propose a direction for future research in enhancing the utilization of these funds for sustainable development of smallholder farming in Nigeria. This paper is based on review of articles identified using the following search algorithm: ldquoagriculturalrdquo, (ldquofinancerdquo or ldquofundingrdquo or ldquocreditrdquo), ldquoAfricardquo, and ldquoNigeriardquo published between 2015 to 2017. The author identified 146 articles from the Emerald Insight database and 722 articles from the ScienceDirect database After removing duplicates and carrying out a thorough analysis based on the problem studied, 59 papers were included in this study. The framework for evaluating the need for smallholder farming financing in Nigeria was studied based on the use of modern farming technology, the level of farm productivity and the livelihood of the farmers. The definition of the term agricultural financing in this article was defined from the perspective of the provision of credit for agricultural activities by the smallholder farmers. While, several literatures that were reviewed indicated that there has been funding provisioned to the smallholder farming industry in Nigeria, but the impact of these funds in terms of level of farm productivity, use of modern farming technology and the livelihood of the farmers is yet to be experienced. To the best of my knowledge, limited study on the evaluation of institutional sector financing has so far been conducted