Access to formal credit of agricultural cooperatives in Vietnam: Obstacles and international lessons

Vietnam has about 14.816 active agricultural cooperatives, making for 65.23% of all cooperatives in the country. Agricultural cooperatives play an unchangeable economic and social role. However, despite their importance, most Vietnamese agricultural cooperatives are small sized, and only 2% of them have access to formal credit, which hindering enormously their development. Combining literature review and in-depth interview methods, the paper identified major factors obstructing the access, which were lack of collateral, loan characteristics, lack of skills and training, as well as long processing time of loan application.