The EU Funded UN Joint STREIT Program has reached the milestone of providing support to over 150,000 Cocoa, Vanilla and Fisheries Dependent Households in the Sepik Region in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in less than a year.

The Support to Rural Entrepreneurship and Trade in Papua New Guinea (STREIT PNG) programme is the largest grant-funded programme of the European Union in the Pacific sub-region. The programme was developed under the eleventh European Development Fund (2014-2020) and is being implemented as a United Nations joint programme under the leadership of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

The programme focuses on the value chains of cocoa, vanilla, and fisheries in the Sepik region. The programme's overall objective is "To increase sustainable and inclusive economic development of rural areas". The approach of the program is to bring sustainable development of the three target value chains by working on the following two components:

• Component 1: Under this component, the programme supports and develops various capacities of direct value chain actors to increase the sustainability and profitability of the chains to maximise value-addition across the whole VC, specifically upstream.
• Component 2: The programme's second component focuses on developing and improving the enabling environment and specific enablers around the value chains. These include communications, infrastructure, renewable energy, and capacities to enhance value chain actors' access to finance, knowledge, information, and markets.

The United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) supports Component 2 of the programme by leading various efforts in financial inclusion focused on:

1. Policy and regulation
2. Value chain-focused financial product and services
3. Improve and expand the distribution channel of financial services
4. Build capacities of financial service providers to cater needs of the agri-value chain actors.

Overall the UNCDF component of the EU-STREIT programme has achieved the following milestones:

• Establishment of 100 new financial service access points in the project area (East and West Sepik)
• Opening of >60,000 bank and mobile money accounts in partnership with financial service providers
• Launch of new products (MSME account) and services (Agunity mobile app for digitally enabled services)
• Financial literacy training to >1500 farmers in the project area

Read EU- STREIT PNG Success Stories HERE.