Microcredit has been considered one of the most significant innovations in the field of development in the last thirty years. It provides collateral free financial resources to the poor worldwide. It plays an important role in poverty eradication, socio-economic development, livelihood diversification and women empowerment especially in the developing and under-developed nations. It has contributed positively to the natural resources management by forming social capital, creating alternate income and diversifying livelihoods of the resource dependent rural people. Natural resource management, in general, and fisheries resources management in particular, are currently undergoing a major paradigm shift. In recent years, the notion of government as the only decision-making authority has been replaced by multi-scale, polycentric governance, which recognizes that a large number of stakeholders in different institutional settings contribute to overall management of resources. Improving the management of natural or common pool resources and empowering local communities, community-based management has become a common strategy in the last two decades. Community-Based Organizations are grassroots institutions that involve rural communities in co-management. Several factors influence the functioning and sustainability of these CBOs which contribute to the management of common-pool resources in Bangladesh. To address the complexities of socio-cultural systems and sustainable natural resource management, managers, practitioners, and theoreticians widely rely on social learning. The evidence of social learning is apparent in collaborative participation and group actions where individuals meet, interact, share ideas, learn collectively and take collective decisions. They adjust the management approaches and change their perceptions according to their social learning in natural resources management. The purpose of the research was to assess the role of microcredit in improving rural livelihoods (mainly fishing households), identify the challenges faced by microcredit institutions, and to explore the process of organizations and obstacles involved in the sustainability of Community-Based Organizations developed by CBFM-2 project in Hakaluki haor area. It was intended to explore the evidence of social learning and capacity building efforts related to microcredit and CBFM-2 project intervention in the study area. The main objective of this research was: to assess the roles of microcredit in improving rural livelihoods with a focus on fishing households and institutional capacity-building. The secondary objectives were: (i) to understand the processes of organization and the challenges that Community Based Organizations (CBOs) face, and (ii) to explore the evidence of social learning pertaining to microcredit and involving CBOs under CBFM-2 project, other local institutions, and fisher households. A qualitative research approach was followed in this case which was supplemented by quantitative data. Several Participatory Rural Appraisal tools, such as interviews (households) by administering semi-structured questionnaires, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, in-depth case studies, and mini-workshops were used at different stages of the research to attain the objective of the study. Together with local communities and other relevant stakeholders the research purposively selected three CBOs and three microcredit women groups in three different villages of Hakaluki haor. The research findings revealed that microcredit played a significant role in socio-economic development of Hakaluki haor, especially household income increment, livelihood diversification, creation of self-employment, poverty reduction and women empowerment though it entrapped few households in vicious cycle of poverty. The research established that CBOs are instrumental and essential for community-based natural resources management through empowering the local communities, and NGOs are important for mobilizing local people, capacity building and providing legal services to the community. It was evident that CBOs faced challenges towards its sustainability due to limited resources and wetland policy changes by the government. The study also revealed the evidence of social learning through microcredit operation and project intervention which changed their perceptions and fisheries management practices. Reforming operational mechanism of microcredit, national wetland leasing policy and legitimating CBOs can remove the challenges of microcredit and help the CBOs to be sustainable. Future research is encouraged to reveal the other issues of microcredit and community-based organizations sustainability.

The green microcredit project in Bangladesh started with the focus of promoting environmental-friendly livelihood practices among the rural marginalized people whose livelihoods were dependent on the extraction of local natural resources. This research examined at the livelihood practices and the livelihood capital of the green microcredit borrowers in Arpara, under Magura District, and in Borlekha, under Moulvibazar District, Bangladesh. Using the Department for International Development, UK (DFID) sustainable livelihood framework, the research analyzed the changes in the borrowers’ capital. The research used both qualitative and quantitative approaches to collect field data using different PRA tools and a survey. It was clear from the research that green microcredit is becoming more popular among the natural resource-dependent borrowers. It was also apparent that the green microcredit borrowers have greater social and human capital than the conventional microcredit borrowers. Although the concept has been in practice for only a short duration, the success of the green microcredit project has encouraged other borrowers to opt for green microcredit. In its short existence, the green microcredit project has had some successes and setbacks. During the data collection process, several strengths and weaknesses were identified. In the concluding chapter, a few recommendations have been put forward keeping in mind the strengths and weaknesses of the project. The positive effects of green microcredit on the environment and natural resource base could be seen in the long run if and when the project is scaled up.

The development interventions of the past thirty years have relied on microcredit and other microfinancial services as a way to include the poor in the dynamics of the free market, so they may have a better chance of benefiting from economic development. Nowadays, the microfinance industry in Bolivia is highly developed, and the country is usually mentioned next to Bangladesh and India as a success case of microcredit, as a myriad of microfinancial institutions operate combining credit, savings and insurance with education, women empowerment or production efforts. In this setting, the Peces Para la Vida II project was started in Bolivia in early 2015, with the objective of improving food security in Bolivia through the promotion of small-scale aquaculture and fisheries in the Bolivian Amazon. As a part of this promotion strategy, a microcredit component was included in the project with the intention of scaling up the benefits found in the first stage of the project via an individual microcredit component and a group microleasing operation. Using a qualitative application of an analytical framework that combines Amartya Sen’s capability approach and the Department for International Development’s sustainable livelihoods approach, this thesis will argue that unless certain conditions on access to markets that enable savings and wealth creation are met, individual microcredit alone may not be sufficient to lead its users towards capabilities that ultimately improve their access to better endowments of various types of capitals, and that the group leasing operation appears to be more promising in terms of allowing those involved as it tackles productivity and market issues simultaneously, but with an implementation plagued with problems and the short time the operation has been underway, it would be premature to be definitive about these results. / Graduate

Au Cameroun, la microfinance s’affirme désormais comme un élément fort capable d’améliorer l’offre et l’accès des services bancaires des couches sociales souvent exclues. C’est la raison pour laquelle, le législateur de la Communauté économique et monétaire de l’Afrique centrale (CEMAC) avait décidé de confectionner un régime juridique spécifique pour permettre à cette nouvelle technique de financement de s’installer et de se développer tout en assurant la fiabilité des acteurs et la maîtrise des opérations. En ce qui concerne sa dimension économique, la microfinance se positionne comme un instrument majeur capable d’œuvrer pour l’intégration de l’économie dite informelle à l’économie formelle. Or, il est désormais acquis que l’économie ne fonctionnera pas sans un droit économique spécifique. Ce droit économique dont l’appréhension apparaît si nécessaire s’est traduit par le droit de l’Organisation pour l’harmonisation en Afrique du droit des affaires (OHADA). Ainsi la microfinance a la particularité de combiner des instruments juridiques de nature différente entraînant l’application de régimes hétérogènes qui offrent d'inégales garanties. Les praticiens sont donc confrontés à une grande complexité qui favorise l’opacité et facilite certaines dérives. En ce sens cette étude vise à identifier les instruments par lesquels le droit intervient sur le fonctionnement global du secteur de la microfinance, ce qui devrait permettre de mieux confronter la théorie juridique avec sa pratique et ainsi faciliter leur mise en cohérence. Par ailleurs, il est possible de se demander si un droit commun de la microfinance ne pourrait pas être dégagé / In Cameroon, Microfinance is now established as a strong element able to improve offers and access to banking services to some part of the society often excluded. That is why the Community legislature of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC) had decided to make a special legal regime to allow this new technique of funding to settle and grow while ensuring the reliability of actors and operation’s control. Regarding the economical aspect, the Cameroon’s government had positioned microfinance as a major tool able to work for the integration of the alleged informal economy to formal economy. However, it is now accepted that the economy will not function without a specific economic law. This economic law with the apprehension that appears so necessary has been converted by the right to the Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa (OHADA). Therefore, microfinance has the distinction of combining legal instruments of different nature leading to the applications of heterogeneous systems that offers unequal guarantees. The practitioners therefore face a complexity that promotes and facilitates some opacity drifts. In this sense, this study aims to identify the instruments by which the law operates in the overall functioning of the global microfinance sector, which should allow to better confront the legal theory with its practice and to facilitate their consistency. Furthermore, it is possible to consider whether a microfinance law might not be elaborated

Providing viable sources of credit is fast becoming an important research topic for governments and NGOs as a means of eliminating poverty. Microcredit is one of the alternative methods that have been introduced as opposed to the conventional lending systems which often exclude the poor. Microcredit has the potential to reduce poverty through social (improvement in health, education and women empowerment) and economic means (increase in employment, income and consumption). Although there are several investigations into the economic effect that Microcredit can have, mostly in the areas of consumption and increase in income, the social effects however, were not given much consideration. In this research the social effect of Microcredit on the education of children between the ages of 7-11 in Malawi was assessed in order to study the difference in school hours between non-members and members of Microcredit institutions. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression was used in this analysis. The results indicate a negative relationship between children of Microcredit members and average hours spent in school. We find that consistently, throughout all regressions the number of school hours was less for members of credit programs.

Over the years, the lending procedures of microcredit has evolved. The original joint liability group lending with simultaneous financing (loans released at once) has been replaced by sequential financing (loans released one by one). Moreover, recent studies suggest individual liability lending in groups to be the optimal choice. While numerous theoretical studies provide thorough models of each of these approaches, none presents a comparative analysis. In this study, we model these three schemes using the framework by Van Tassel (1999) and compare them. Further, we add exogenous peer monitoring costs and within-group heterogeneity of loan sizes to our models. Our findings prove that, in the presence of information asymmetry, group lending with joint liability dominates individual liability lending in groups. Furthermore, the interest rate of the sequential model is more sensitive to changes of monitoring costs or opportunity costs of capital than in the sequential model. On the contrary, sequential approach allows for higher degree of within-group heterogeneity of loan sizes. It is ambiguous which model achieves higher profit and lower interest rate. Our results confirm that the choice of optimal financing approach is determined by the characteristics of borrowers. JEL Classificiation G2 Keywords...

Smallholder farmers across the world, including Mozambique, are often faced with limited growth potential. This could mainly be attributed to an inability to purchase sufficient inputs to produce more and better-quality crops and to cultivate more land. This, in turn, is directly related to the fact that many of them do not qualify for credit, or put in another way, they are financially excluded. Smallholder farmers are known to have little or no assets to offer as collateral against loans. However, the question to be asked is, does this matter? This study proves that credit does make a difference in the community of Belas, Manica Province, Mozambique, despite the perceived high costs thereof. If given access to credit, these smallholder farmers will continuously make use of this opportunity, which in turn will lead to an increase in the procurement of inputs. Data obtained from a group of 142 smallholder farmers in the Belas community in Mozambique, and stored in a cloud-based data system, was used to analyse and graphically depict the uptake of loans, repayment records and the increase in the procurement of inputs. The number of new loans taken over time is used as a measurement of the initial demand for loans, while the repayment rate acts as the repayment ability of the farmers, further the continuous uptake of consecutive loans is used to further measure whether the farmers find value in taking up loans. The repayment rate and uptake are also measured in respect of gender, age and financial inclusion to establish whether these factors cause any deviations from the mean. The data made it evident that, once loans are made available to these farmers, they do make use of the opportunity, and once they repay their first loan, they are likely to take up a new, larger loan to further increase the procurement of inputs, and at a later stage, also increase the use of equipment like tractors. The sample group of farmers was initially slow at repaying their first loans, but the repayment rate of the farmers increased once they moved to their second and third consecutive loans. This could be attributed to the continuous training they received once they started to qualify for loans. The uptake of credit was also affected by the age of farmers, where farmers between the ages of 41 and 50 were more likely to take up loans and furthermore to repay their loans and take up consecutive loans. With respect to the repayment ability of a farmer, it was found that a longer-term relationship between the financier and the farmer resulted in a better repayment ability by the latter. Women were found to repay their loans marginally faster than men did. In conclusion, this study found that farmers do see the value of credit, despite the perceived high costs, and that the uptake of loans leads to an increase in the procurement of inputs. It is recommended that microcredit be accompanied by training, to ensure the effective production of their products and therefore the repayment of their credit. MFIs need to operate in a competitive environment to ensure that no one company can inflate the costs of lending, this means that policies need to accommodate easy access to this market. / Mini Dissertation (MSc Agric (Agricultural Economics))--University of Pretoria, 2020. / African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) / Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development / MSc Agric (Agricultural Economics) / Unrestricted

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In Ghana, the number of people living in extreme poverty has reduced. Yet the poverty rate is currently 24.2 %, which is still high considering that Ghana is a lower middle-income country (Emmanuel, Frempong, Opareh & Rose, 2015; 35). In Ghana, the poor are classified in two groups: “ 1) … those who live above an upper line of GHC 1314.00 per day which is equivalent to US $ 1.83, and; 2) those within a lower poverty line of GHC 729.05 equivalent to US $ 1.03 a day…” (Emmanuel, Frempong, Opareh & Rose, 2015; 35). Those who “… live above the upper line of GHC 1314.00 are considered as non-poor, whereas those with a consumption expenditure equivalent or below GHC 729.05 a lower poverty line are in absolute poverty or living in extreme poverty…” (Emmanuel et al., 2015). In Ghana, Yaidoo and Kalaiah (2018) agree that microcredit programs are a neoliberal ploy that keep poor people in a perpetual state of poverty. Most microcredit beneficiaries are located in the rural areas and majority are the lowest income earners of the employed population. Microcredit should ordinarily have a broader range of empowerment services, yet the Ghana microcredit programs do not have this. Microcredit in Ghana has become a debt trap and its benefits to the poor is illusory (Yaidoo and Kalaiah, 2018). Most microcredits have high interest rates and seek to profit operations which had created a situation where microcredits are an additional burden to the people, impacting negatively on their livelihood (Yaidoo and Kalaiah, 2018). Further, Yaidoo and Kalaiah (2018) pinpointed that in Ghana, by observing the crippling consequences of debt burden on countries (such as Ghana who opted for the Highly Indebted Poor Country status in 2002), the world financial crisis in 2007/08, and cases of high default in repayment of debt, it would make sense to adopt a more impactful approach to microcredit. In that other role, players are needed to fill the gap with intervention resulting in improving people’s livelihood. This study aimed to empirically access the effect of microcredit on beneficiaries’ livelihood improvement. The study was conducted in four regions of Ghana, with the main objective to find out whether the Self-Supported Assistant Programme (SSAP) microcredit has improved the livelihood of its beneficiaries. The specific objectives of the study were to: i) evaluate the Beneficiaries Livelihoods Status as per their asset accumulation, voluntary saving, capabilities and frequency of loan repayment, and; ii) to estimate the effects of Demographic + Socioeconomic + Loan T&Cs Variables (financial training + loan interest rates + loan monitoring) on Beneficiaries Livelihoods Improvement (asset accumulation, voluntary saving, capabilities).

La presente investigación describe tres etapas, la primera acerca de los orígenes y evolución histórica de las microfinanzas en el Peru y en el mudo, la segunda está basada en la situación actual de las microfinanzas y la tercera acerca de la controversia de si realmente las microfinanzas contribuyen al desarrollo de los más necesitados. Esta investigación se desarrolló entorno a la literatura de algunos autores que analizan el tema desde diferentes puntos de vista, algunos coinciden en que las microfinanzas van más allá del solo hecho de pensar en el microcrédito, es decir también se debe considerar al microahorro y los seguros. Asimismo, se hizo una revisión de algunos casos de éxito en países de Latinoamérica, analizando datos relevantes como el nivel de sus colocaciones, monto de los créditos y número de clientes y a la vez una revisión del caso Peru de como las microfinanzas se han venido desarrollando en los últimos años. Por otro lado, el presente trabajo pretende clarificar si realmente las microfinanzas contribuyen al desarrollo de los más necesitados. Para ello, se realizó una revisión de sus orígenes, como se encuentra actualmente las microfinanzas y finalmente dar respuesta a dicha controversia. Para finalizar, en función del análisis realizado, obtener conclusiones y recomendaciones relevantes con la información recopilada. / This paper research describes three stages, the first about the origins and historical evolution of microfinance in Peru and the world, the second is based on the current situation of microfinance and the third about the controversy over whether microfinance really contributes to the development of the poorest. This research was developed around the literature of some authors who analyse the subject from different points of view, some agree that microfinance goes beyond just thinking about microcredit, that is, micro-savings and insurance must also be considered. Likewise, a review of some success cases in Latin American countries was made, analyzing relevant data such as the level of their placements, amount of loans and number of clients, and at the same time a review of the case of Peru on how microfinance has been developing. in recent years. On the other hand, this paper research tries to clarify if microfinance really contributes to the development of the poorest. To do this, a review of its origins was carried out, how are microfinance currently, and finally to respond to this controversy. Finally, based on the analysis performed, obtain relevant conclusions and recommendations with the information collected. / Trabajo de Suficiencia Profesional

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis makes a theoretical review of the microfinance argument, which claims that microfinance would be accompanied with democratization or consolidation of democracy. This thesis firstly analyzes the theory of modern microfinance, especially its propensity of converting borrowers into modern citizens. Secondly, this thesis analyzes five major theories supporting the microfinance argument: (a) modernization and economic development, (b) economic fairness, (c) gender justice, (d) social capital, and (e) civil society. In addition, this thesis reviews critical perspectives of these five theories and makes a general discussion. Finally, this thesis concludes the reasonableness and limitation of the microfinance argument.