Agriculture
More than 24,000 Ugandan micro-enterprises received financing in the first year of a new partnership between EIB Global — the development arm of the European Investment Bank Group — and Centenary Bank, according to the programme's first annual disbursement report, released this week. The numbers offer a rare, granular look at what happens when a large, patient credit line is deliberately steered toward the borrowers Uganda's formal banking sector has historically found hardest to reach: women, rural households and small agricultural enterprises.
The EIB Global–Centenary Bank agreement, signed in 2024, is structured to make €100 million — about Shs428 billion — available to private-sector enterprises in Uganda over seven years. Half of that, a €50 million credit line, comes directly from EIB Global to Centenary Bank, a lender that has built its franchise on microfinance; Centenary Bank is matching the sum, doubling the pool available to borrowers. EIB Global describes the credit line as its largest single microfinance loan anywhere in the African, Caribbean and Pacific regions, and it is specifically targeted at enterprises employing fewer than ten full-time workers — the informal, often invisible tier of the economy that conventional collateral-based lending routinely screens out.
Beating its own targets
What distinguishes the first-year results is not just the volume of lending but who it reached. Women accounted for more than 60 percent of beneficiaries, comfortably ahead of the programme's own 50 percent target, while 75 percent of financed projects were located in rural areas, well above a 60 percent target. Trade businesses took up half of the financing, but agriculture was close behind, representing nearly 40 percent of financed enterprises — a striking share given how reluctant formal lenders in Uganda have generally been to underwrite farming risk.
“The funding opportunity offered to Centenary Bank is addressing the challenges of access to finance, especially for women and rural communities,” said EIB Vice-President Marko Primorac. “This will continue to spur private-sector growth and strengthen Uganda's economic resilience.”
The scale of that gap is worth spelling out. Nationally, only about 11 percent of Ugandans borrow specifically for agricultural purposes, and by some estimates roughly 80 percent of farmers lack the conventionally bankable collateral — titled land, in most cases — that banks require. Uganda's agricultural lending rate averaged 20.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026, well above the 18.65 percent economy-wide average lending rate, according to a Bank of Uganda credit conditions survey published in July. Women, who by some estimates supply 72 percent of Uganda's agricultural labour, are disproportionately shut out: without land titles in their own names, they typically cannot offer the collateral banks demand, even when their farming enterprises are productive and creditworthy in every other respect.
Centenary Bank's Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Godfrey Byekwaso, framed the first-year numbers as evidence the model is working as designed. “Our cooperation with EIB Global is making good progress, and the coming years will deliver even greater impact to the business community, especially in rural areas,” he said. “The financing has helped us bridge local funding gaps and given us a greater opportunity to serve and grow small businesses, enabling them to integrate successfully into the formal financial system.”
Beyond the balance sheet
The programme's design goes further than simply disbursing loans. As part of the partnership, EIB Global is running an Africa Women Rising Initiative meant to expand financial services specifically for women entrepreneurs, and Centenary Bank says it has used the collaboration to redesign products around women-owned businesses and to deliver business training in financial literacy and record-keeping — the kind of non-financial support that development economists increasingly argue is as important as the credit itself in determining whether small loans translate into durable business growth. Centenary Bank reports its number of female clients has grown 21 percent since the partnership began, while non-performing loans among women borrowers have fallen by more than 8 percent — a data point the bank is likely to lean on as evidence that lending to women is not, in fact, the higher-risk proposition some lenders have historically assumed.
The programme has also reached one of Uganda's most overlooked economic populations: refugees. Of the loans issued in 2025, 200 went to refugees living in Uganda, including people who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. One beneficiary, Gissele Muganza, a Congolese refugee running a children's clothing business, received a Shs2 million loan that she used both to expand her business and to help finance a bachelor's degree. Her monthly net profit has since nearly doubled to Shs1.1 million. It is a single case study among tens of thousands of loans, but it illustrates the kind of compounding effect — business growth paired with human capital investment — that the programme's architects say they are trying to engineer at scale.
What it means for Uganda's agricultural financing puzzle
The timing is notable. Ugandan lawmakers and central bank officials have spent much of the past several weeks publicly wrestling with a tightening credit environment for farmers: a Bank of Uganda survey found net tightening of agricultural credit conditions of 13.5 percent in the first quarter of 2026, driven partly by shilling depreciation and shocks from Middle East tensions rippling into freight and input costs. Savings and credit cooperatives (SACCOs), long positioned as the informal backbone of rural agricultural finance, have simultaneously been forced into governance reforms and fresh leadership elections after fraud scandals hollowed out schemes such as Emyooga in some districts. Against that backdrop, a seven-year, formally structured, internationally backed credit line — one explicitly designed to hit rural and women-led targets rather than simply chase urban trade lending — represents a different model: patient capital paired with technical assistance, run through an established commercial bank rather than a cooperative structure vulnerable to local governance failures.
EIB Global's relationship with Centenary Bank did not begin with this facility. The two institutions have partnered since 2008, and since 1981 EIB Global has invested more than €388 million in Uganda supporting private-sector development, with recurring emphasis on agriculture, financial inclusion and gender equality. European Commissioner for International Partnerships Jozef Síkela cast the latest results as a proof point for the EU's broader Global Gateway development strategy on the continent. “Access to finance is often what allows a small business to grow, hire and invest in the future, creating jobs, supporting families, strengthening local communities and making economies more resilient,” Síkela said. “Through this partnership, tens of thousands of micro and small businesses in Uganda have received that opportunity. Its strong reach among women entrepreneurs and rural communities demonstrates Global Gateway at its best.”
With six years remaining on the seven-year facility, the harder test is durability: whether disbursement volumes and rural, women-led targeting can be sustained as the credit line matures, and whether the roughly 40 percent share flowing to agriculture holds up as farmers face a season already marked by drought stress and rising input costs. For a sector where formal credit has long been the exception rather than the rule, the first year's numbers offer measurable, if early, evidence that a targeted, well-capitalised financing model can shift who gets to borrow — and what they can do with it.
