Rewarding resilience: Climate-linked credit for India’s women farmers
The Secured Climate-linked Agri Lending Ecosystem (SCALE) expands access to finance for smallholder farmers often excluded from formal lending—many of them women—and integrates incentives for using climate-friendly approaches.
- women farmers
- gender
- gender
- climate change
By Berber Kramer, Tarun Katoch, and Julie GhostlawOctober 15, 2026
Key takeaways
- The Secured Climate-linked Agri Lending Ecosystem (SCALE) expands access to finance for smallholder farmers often excluded from formal lending—many of them women—and integrates incentives for using climate-friendly approaches.
- The financing model combines incentives that reward farmers for using proven climate-smart practices with credit, insurance, and advisory services.
- SCALE is now seeking partners and investment to expand its reach. For every dollar of grant funding invested, SCALE is expected to mobilize approximately six dollars in climate-smart agricultural investment.
India’s smallholder farmers have only limited access to finance that could help cushion them against a range of shocks. Around 70 million farmers still rely partly on informal credit, while many others struggle to secure loans because they lack the conventional collateral required by formal lenders.
These barriers disproportionately affect women. Despite making up about a third of India’s agricultural labor force, they own only around 11% of farmland and receive just 5% of agricultural credit. Because land is the main form of collateral formal lenders accept, this ownership gap likely limits women’s access to loans. As a result, millions of women farmers remain excluded from the formal financial services needed to invest in more productive and resilient farming practices.