Without access to financial services, smallholder farmers cannot reach their productive potential. In Kenya, the Program for Rural Outreach of Financial Innovations and Technologies (PROFIT) aimed to open up access to capital and provide technical assistance so that small scale rural enterprises could become more profitable and more capable of attracting private investment. During the project’s design stage, a market assessment of the country’s financial sector found that local commercial banks had considerable liquidity but were reluctant to lend to smallholders in agriculture because the risk was perceived to be too high. This was even more so for enterprises owned by women or youth, who tend to lack collateral. Microfinance institutions, meanwhile, were facing their own constraints.