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CGAP and IDH Announce Selected ABERA Cohort 2 Service Providers  

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 24, 2025 – CGAP and IDH today announced the selection of eight financial and agricultural service providers that will be part of the second cohort of ABERA, Accelerating Business to Empower Rural women in Agriculture. 

ABERA is a collaboration between CGAP and IDH that aims to improve the climate resilience of service providers and the rural women they serve by fostering innovations in inclusive finance that are commercially viable. Through peer learning, tailored technical support, and targeted business model analysis, cohort members are equipped to innovate in ways that benefit their businesses while helping rural women adapt and thrive in the face of climate change.    

Following the launch of the first ABERA cohort in 2022, CGAP and IDH have now completed a rigorous selection process for the second cohort from a pool of 225 applicants who responded to the call for expressions of interest. The eight service providers selected share the ABERA vision, view inclusive finance as essential to business success, and have practical ideas on how to use financial services to increase the climate resilience of smallholder women farmers. They are: 

  • Advans Côte d’Ivoire, a gender-intentional microfinance institution offering savings, credit, and climate-smart solutions focused on rural women.  
  • AgriEvolve, a coffee offtaker who partners with fintechs to provide receivables-based credit financing to small-scale growers.  
  • Agro Supply, an agribusiness using a unique layaway model that helps women save for climate‐smart inputs, reducing risk and increasing incomes. 
  • Cooperative Bank of Oromia, the largest cooperative bank with a commercial bank license in Ethiopia; they also have a division dedicated to smallholder farmers and advance several climate, data, and gender initiatives.    
  • Dvara E-Registry, an agri-fintech that provides agricultural services, digitizes farmer data, originates loans on behalf of banks and MFIs, and provides customized financing solutions particularly for women.  
  • Lersha, an agribusiness platform offering financial and agricultural services in partnership with fintechs, banks, and agtechs.    
  • Tony’s Open Chain, a service provider that aims to create a more equitable and sustainable cocoa supply chain and that partners with women-led cooperatives and other cocoa processors.    
  • Varaha, a carbon removal company focused on nature-based solutions and that aims to boost the incomes of smallholder farmers through agroforestry, biochar production.      

This second cohort of service providers joins ABERA’s first cohort, which consists of Avanti Finance,  BRAC Tanzania Finance Limited (BTFL), Hello Tractor, Samunnati and Sistema.bio.   

CGAP and IDH will work alongside the members of the cohorts to generate evidence and insights that guide practitioners to what works and what doesn’t in serving rural women. To stay up to date with the insights collected on this journey, please visit https://www.cgap.org/topics/collections/abera.