The YoBloCo Awards, the Youth in Agriculture Blog Competition, have announced the top twelve bloggers.

The jury has made its decision and the winners of the YoBloCo Awards have been selected. We are excited to unveil the Top 12 Bloggers of the Awards! The actual 9 Winners will be announced at the Prize Giving Ceremony of the competition, which will take place during CTA’s 2014 International Conference “Fin4Ag” www.fin4ag.org, in Nairobi, Kenya, from 14 – 18 July 2014. All the 12 best participants will be invited to take part in the conference.

Check out the page that has links to the winning bloggers.

The theme for the Fin4Ag conference is “Revolutionising finance for agri-value chains.”

Agricultural finance institutions, and the policies, rules and regulations under which they operate, are lagging behind changes in the “real economy”. Recent years have seen significant innovations in certain countries but these are slow in spreading across borders or, for that matter, across institutions. In these circumstances, decision-makers in farmers’ organisations, financial institutions, government bodies and other institutions interested in agricultural finance should shift their approach from incrementally trying to improve on their existing models to reinventing their business or regulatory models in order to capitalize on all these new possibilities. It is time for a paradigm shift in agricultural finance.