Mkumbo, Mganzwa2024-06-052024-06-052007https://www.suaire.sua.ac.tz/handle/123456789/6227Master of Business Administration in AgribusinessThe provision of credit has increasingly been regarded as an important tool for raising the incomes of rural populations, mainly by mobilizing available natural resources to more productive uses. The rural population has for many years been serviced by the informal financial sector. Meyer and Nagajaran (2000) define informal financial sector as including farmer credit from traders, input suppliers, moneylenders, friends and relatives and Rotating and Saving Credit associations (ROSCAs), which are not supervised by the national financial authorities. This informal sector work on loan advances in short term deferred payment system. The credit is advanced to farmers by any of the above mentioned informal service providers and the repayment is usually in form of crops produced upon harvest. Since many farmers3 can't afford to store their produce due to cash requirements, receive poor payments, which do not enable them to retain enough proceeds to facilitate the next planting season. In the recent past, there has been an increased tendency to support agriculture aimed at formation of small-scale agribusinesses. Braverman and Guasch (1986) found that despite the efforts to overcome the widespread lack of credit facilities, especially among smallholders, and the expansion of credit in the rural areas of poor countries, the majority still have only limited access to credit services to support their operations. Seeing this prospect the Private Agricultural Sector Support (PASS) was established under the Agriculture Sector Programme Support (ASPS) Programme (funded by DAN1DA) in 2000 with the aim of bridging this gap by providing financial linkage and business development services to the rural entrepreneurs. These services aim at promoting rural agribusiness by linking the agribusiness men /women to the banking services (URT, 2003). This research paper was aimed at examining the effectiveness of the PASS objectives with the view of establishing their role in determining the access of rural small-scale farmers to financial services.enRural entrepreneursFinancial servicesPASSTanzaniaThesis