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,...

Using data from Malawi, this paper examines factors that influence a household’s likelihood of facing credit constraints. Households with larger land holdings have a higher probability of reporting credit constraints, apparently due to lack of secure land rights which could enable households...

The paper investigates the impact of credit constraints on the adoption of hybrid maize among rural households in Malawi using the treatment-effects model. Results reveal that after effectively correcting for endogeneity, credit constraints have a reducing effect on the size of land allocated to...

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, hybrid...

This paper investigates the impact of credit constraints on the adoption of hybrid maize among rural households in Malawi. To address the endogenous and binary nature of the household's credit constraints status, we employ a treatment-effects model to consistently estimate the effect of credit...

In this Food Policy Review, the authors take a fresh look at the role of rural financial policy in improving household food security and alleviating poverty. They develop a conceptual framework for relating access to financial services to food security and review empirical findings on household...

Micronutrient malnutrition, also known as hidden hunger, affects two billion people worldwide. In recent years, the global challenge of reducing hidden hunger and hence improving related health outcomes through agricultural interventions has received much attention. One potential solution is...

The initial success of microfinance programs in the 1970s led pioneers to think that many essential problems of the poor might be resolved by access to credit alone -- the ability to acquire assets, to start businesses, to finance emergency needs and to insure against illness and disaster. Part...