The Nigerian catfish industry is the second biggest aquaculture sector in Africa with production estimated to be as high as 1 million tons with an estimated 285,000 mainly small-scale farmers. The need for input credit, particularly to fund feed purchases, has been identified as a major constraint to sectoral growth and efficiency. Small-scale aquaculture farmers are largely excluded from access to traditional input loan products which are generally not designed to meet aquaculture farmer business cycle requirements. For example, small-scale farmers lack of collateral to secure loans and can only make repayments when the crop of fish is harvested. Further factors are a widespread inability to demonstrate their credit worthiness as most do not maintain financial records of their business performance and the lack of retail credit providers with the requisite infrastructure and aquaculture knowledge to service thousands of small farmers. Innovative approaches are thus required to develop suitable credit products and service providers for this sector. The Nigerian catfish sector provides some valuable insights. For example, 1) institutions based on traditional social capital such as catfish ‘clusters’ and farmer cooperatives have been proven to serve as effective vehicles for providing surety on loans and monitoring farmer production performance; 2) initiatives to foster farmer production and financial performance record keeping by innovative small-scale credit providers, feed companies and development NGOs are proving effective in making credit more widely accessible to small scale farmers and 3) private and parastatal credit providers are piloting financial products tailored to farmer business requirements.