Analyses of the Determinants of Access to Credit by Smallholder Farmers in Togo

Togo's agriculture needs to modernize itself by changing its traditional techniques, it needs to intensify to follow the course of globalization and to integrate into an economic competition. To do so, adequate financing is required. Starting from the lower class in Togo, small farms cannot finance themselves, whereas they should be excluded from commercial banks because of the nature of their activity. This paper analyses the factors that may or may not allow small farms to access credit from Financial Institutions in Togo. The logit model was used under Spss software to analyze data obtained from a survey of 440 family farms and 12 financial institutions in Togo. It is obtained as determining parameters whether or not farmers accessed credit from the FIs: the number of years of experience, membership in a farmers' organization, income on the main activity, participation in training or meetings for the setting up of agricultural micro-projects. The descriptive analysis shows the total exclusion of small farm banks. Of the 12 financial institutions that were the subject of our survey, only the microfinance institutions offer credit to family farms.