Results
Issue paper
2011
Rural Women’s Access to Financial Services: Credit, Savings and Insurance. ESA Working Paper No. 11-07
This paper reviews rural women’s access to financial services, a key factor of successful rural development strategies. Designing appropriate financial products for women to be able to save, borrow and insure is essential to strengthen women’s role as producers and widen the economic opportunities available to them. For this purpose it is essential to understand how context-specific legal rights, social norms, family responsibilities and women’s access to and control over other resources shape their need for capital and their ability to obtain it. The paper argues that it is important that development strategies that aim to boost rural women’s productive [...]
Tool
2010
Agricultural Value Chain Finance. Tools and Lessons
This volume provides a global review of experiences and learning on the broad subject of value chain finance for agriculture in developing countries. Value chains in agriculture comprise a set of actors who conduct a linked sequence of value-adding activities involved in bringing a product from its raw material stage to the final consumer. Value chain finance, as described in this volume, refers to the financial flows to those actors from both within the value chain and financial flows to those actors from the outside as a result of their being linked within a value chain.
Issue paper
2010
Agricultural Investment Funds for Developing Countries
This publication provides insight into the nature and operations of agricultural investment funds and draws lessons for development agencies, governments and investors. It was developed from “Agricultural investment funds for developing countries” (2009), a research study undertaken as a joint collaboration of ConCap Connective Capital (ConCap) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in order to better understand the growth and potential of agriculture and agribusiness investment funds. It included a stocktaking analysis of agricultural investment funds as well as case studies of distinct funds and fund management structures. This publication is enhanced with a complementary analysis of agricultural funds in the broader context [...]
Issue paper
2009
Towards a Policy that Pairs Microcredit and Micro-Insurance Tools. What Impacts on the Fight Against Poverty and Risk Management? Lessons Learned from Experiences in India and Madagascar. Policy Brief. EASYPol Module 206
Microcredit and micro-insurance, considered within the larger microfinance current, are two risk management tools currently being developed by governments and international development agencies to reduce vulnerability associated with poverty in rural areas. Discussions about credit protection increasingly invoke the need to create linkages with insurance services that are tailored to the risks rural people in developing countries face. Once a country’s financial and banking sectors have been developed, the pairing of these two instruments could do one of two things. It may present a veritable opportunity to emerge from the vicious cycle of poverty, or it may introduce an additional [...]
Tool
2005
Decentralization of Agricultural Services: Decentralization of Rural Financial Services. EASYPol Series 014
This paper first examines the characteristics of rural financial services, including demand and supply factors in rural financial markets. It draws attention to past failures of centralized and directed rural credit services, and the emergence of a new broader vision of rural financial services, based on liberal economics and decentralization policies. The conceptual framework for reform of rural financial services is discussed, and important principles of decentralization reiterated.
Policy implications, in terms of options for decentralization, and the roles and responsibilities of the government are next examined. Various options which might be considered under deconcentration, devolution, and diversification of ownership of [...]