AccessHolding Sets First GHG Baseline, Disburses $3.2M in Green Loans

AccessHolding's network of microfinance banks across Liberia, Madagascar, Nigeria, Rwanda and Zambia served more than 287,000 clients in 2025, with 132,448 women borrowers representing nearly half the total loan portfolio by client numbers, according to the Berlin-based group's 2025 Impact Report. Microfinance loans account for approximately 80 percent of the Group's overall loan portfolio, and the Group disbursed more than USD 3.2 million in green loans supporting renewable energy and energy-efficient solutions during the year, alongside establishing its first consolidated greenhouse gas inventory.

 

Why Half the Portfolio Going to Women Borrowers Is a Meaningful Figure

 

Women's access to formal credit remains disproportionately constrained across many emerging and frontier markets, often due to limited collateral, informal income streams, and lending practices historically calibrated around male-headed businesses. Against that backdrop, women accounting for nearly half of AccessHolding's total outstanding loan portfolio by client numbers, and receiving more than USD 80 million in outstanding loans, represents a genuinely substantial share rather than a token inclusion metric, particularly given that in Liberia specifically, women make up almost 70 percent of all clients, and they represent the majority of borrowers in Madagascar and Zambia as well.

That pattern extends into the Group's own workforce, where women represent approximately 48 percent of all employees and slightly outnumber men in middle management positions, with more than 400 women promoted during the year. AccessHolding's launch of its first Women's Mentorship Programme in 2025, which drew 110 applications from five banks and saw 17 mentees complete a six-month programme supported by 14 volunteer mentors, indicates the Group is treating gender parity in leadership as a deliberate, resourced initiative rather than an incidental outcome of its lending focus.

 

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What Establishing a First GHG Inventory Signals for a Financial Institution

 

AccessHolding's 2025 report marks the establishment of the Group's first consolidated greenhouse gas inventory, measuring operational emissions across the network at approximately 1,400 tonnes of CO2 equivalent for Scope 1 and 880 tonnes for Scope 2, covering all Group entities except AccessBank Liberia due to data availability limitations. The report is explicit that AccessHolding's direct environmental footprint is modest compared with carbon-intensive industries, and that the Group's more significant climate contribution lies not in its own operations but in how it allocates capital and manages climate-related risk across its lending portfolio.

That framing matters for understanding what this baseline actually represents: for a financial institution, the operational emissions figure captures only a small fraction of its total climate relevance, since the far larger impact runs through the businesses and sectors it finances, agriculture, trade, transport, and small enterprises across markets highly exposed to droughts, floods, cyclones and shifting rainfall patterns. Establishing the operational baseline is nonetheless a necessary first step toward the Group's stated Net Zero Strategy, and the report notes environmental and social risk is increasingly integrated into lending decisions through the Group's Environmental and Social Management System, extending climate consideration into credit assessment rather than confining it to the Group's own facilities.

The USD 3.2 million in green loans disbursed during the year, financing renewable energy and energy-efficient solutions including solar systems for businesses and households, gives that broader climate-finance ambition a concrete, if still modest, starting figure. The Group's Madagascar headquarters now operate entirely on solar power, and AB Bank Zambia is expanding solar installations across its branch network, extending the same logic of reducing operational emissions while building energy resilience in markets where grid reliability is often inconsistent.

 

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How the Technical Assistance Model Differs From Direct Capital Deployment

 

Beyond its own lending, AccessHolding implemented 21 technical assistance projects across four network banks in 2025, in partnership with six donors including the European Investment Bank, KfW, USAID and Germany's GIZ. These projects span expanding digital rural finance for smallholder farmers and women-led communities, supporting MSME resilience through emergency financing facilities, and building institutional capacity through cybersecurity assessments and business process re-engineering. That structure, channelling donor and development finance institution funding through the network banks for capacity-building rather than relying solely on AccessHolding's own capital, extends the Group's reach and expertise considerably beyond what its balance sheet alone would support.

The Group's internal knowledge-sharing infrastructure reinforces that same network-wide model: Access Campus, its leadership development programme, has produced 211 graduates since inception, while ACCESSMIND, its digital learning platform, has delivered more than 193,000 e-learning experiences across the network since 2017, more than 14,000 of them completed during 2025 alone. That scale of shared learning infrastructure, built once and used across all five network banks, would be difficult for any single subsidiary to replicate independently, illustrating how the Group's value extends beyond capital allocation into institutional capacity-building shared across its markets.

 

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What the Country-Level Variation Reveals

 

Performance and priorities vary meaningfully across the five network banks. AccessBank Liberia grew its net loan portfolio by 29 percent and deposits by 20 percent during the year, holding a 40 percent market share of the country's microfinance sector, while acknowledging its environmental initiatives remain at an early stage, having connected nine branches to the national power grid and reduced generator dependence for an estimated USD 33,000 in energy cost savings. AB Bank Zambia measured its operational emissions for the first time in 2025 and expanded digital account opening and mobile wallet services, while AB Microfinance Bank Nigeria maintained longstanding community partnerships addressing period poverty and support for homeless youth alongside its core lending business.

Whether AccessHolding's newly established emissions baseline translates into measurable reduction targets in future reporting periods, and whether the Group's green loan disbursements scale meaningfully beyond their current modest base as climate risk continues affecting the agricultural livelihoods much of its client base depends on, will indicate how far this year's foundational climate work develops into the kind of substantive climate strategy the report signals AccessHolding intends to build.

 

Source: Access Microfinance Holding AG