The human side of financing smallholder farmers: an interview with Roel Messie
Roel Messie, IDH Investment Management CEO and Farmfit Fund lead, joined Kristina Altukhova on the podcast "The human side of building" to discuss the Farmfit Fund's work financing smallholder farmers and agri-SMEs in emerging markets, and his perspective on the human dynamics of capital raising, entrepreneurship, and the investment behind it.
Launched in 2019 with the Dutch government, JDE Peet's, Mondelez, FMO, and Rabobank as backers, the Farmfit Fund invests in businesses built around smallholder farmers, often where local banks won't, and without relying on collateral. Now in the final year of its investment period, the fund is set to reach a portfolio of around €70 million. The conversation covers how the fund evaluates and supports the businesses it backs, why solutions from one emerging market often translate more usefully to another than models from developed economies, and how the fund adapted its strategy when some of its original assumptions about partnering with large banks and commodity traders didn't hold up.
Watch (or listen to) the full conversation below to hear Roel’s viewpoint and learnings from the Farmfit Fund on what it really takes to back smallholder farmers and agri-SMEs in emerging markets, and the honesty, trust and course-correction that make those investments work.
It's not about replicating concepts that work in one place and applying them elsewhere, because every market is different. Sometimes it works the other way around too: an idea developed in one region ends up being adopted somewhere else entirely, including in Europe or the US.
