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...

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,...

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...

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...

Group lending has received much attention in recent years because of its perceived potential in providing financial services to poor households that lack traditional collateral. The analysis in this paper focuses on the effects of program design, community and group characteristics on the...

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...

How many microfinance institutions (MFIs) exist in the developing world? What are their current performances? In 1999, an International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) team on microfinance conducted a survey on MFIs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in order to offer a new in-depth...

This paper is based on community-level data from 188 villages in rural Madagascar. The survey that was conducted in 1997 made extensive use of long-term recall questions ascertaining changes during the past 10 years in rice yields, wages, population, soil fertility, and other pertinent variables...