The objective of IFPRI's multicountry research program on rural financial policies for food security of the poor is to identify policies and institutional arrangements that help the poor integrate themselves into sustainable savings and credit systems such that they have an increased capacity to...

This paper presents a new methodological framework for measuring the level of household access to credit. It provides an analytical framework for examining the determinants of household credit limits and derives implications on information needed to examine the extent to which households are...

Development institutions and projects frequently seek to target poorer segments of the population. Yet, existing methods for evaluating their outreach are generally unsuited to most operational settings, since they are either too costly and cumbersome (e.g., detailed income or household...

Bangladesh has witnessed major strides in providing financial services to the rural poor. These services are provided largely through innovative group-based credit programs of several nongovernmental organizations. The implicit but widespread assumption has been that they are indeed placed in...

This paper analyzes the repayment rates of credit groups belonging to three group-based credit programs in Bangladesh: the Association for Social Advancement (ASA), the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), and the Rangpur Dinajpur Rural Service (RDRS). Hypotheses are drawn from...

In Malawi, maize is the major crop and food staple. Given limited off-farm employment opportunities, much-needed increases in household income for improving food security must come from gains in agricultural productivity through better technology and more profitable crops. In the past,...

This paper presents a profile of poverty in Egypt for 1997. It assesses the magnitude of poverty and its distribution across geographic and socioeconomic groups, provides information on the characteristics of the poor, illustrates the heterogeneity among the poor, and helps identify empirical...

Helping to reduce vulnerability poses a new set of challenges for public policy. The most immediate challenge is to determine the appropriate role for public action if there should be a role at all. A starting point is the ways that communities and extended families try to cope with...

The paper departs from the standard practice that takes the estimated marginal effects of either the amount of credit received or membership in a credit program as measures of the impact of access to credit on household welfare. The marginal effects of the formal credit limit variable on...

The paper uses the concept of credit limit to analyze the determinants of household access to and participation in informal and formal credit markets in Malawi. Households are found to be credit constrained, on average, both in the formal and informal sectors; they borrow, on average, less than...