Working paper
The Farmer Field School (FFS) approach emerged out of a concrete, immediate problem. At the end of the eighties of the last century farmers in Indonesia were putting their crops, their health and their environment at severe risk through massive abuse of highly toxic pesticides promoted aggressively by the private industry and government. Pest species were becoming resistant and in some cases...
Markets play a basic role in economic welfare. In rich countries life would be unimaginable without access to a wide array of reasonably well functioning markets, from food to credit and insurance. It is almost never the case that a rich-country household has to produce something in order to consume it, or that its members cannot sell their labour for a salary or wage. Credit markets function...
This case study examines the scaling-up experiences of two microfinance institutions: the Nirdhan Utthan Bank Limited (NUBL) in Nepal and the Self-Help Group (SHG)-Bank linkage programme of the National Agricultural Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) in India. Both NUBL and NABARD groups use self-regulation (peer selection, peer monitoring and peer enforcement of contracts) as...
Child labour is widespread in developing countries, but its causes are debatable. Poverty is considered the primary reason, but many theoretical and empirical analyses show that other factors, such as lack of access to credit, poor school quality and labour market opportunities play equal or even greater roles in the decision to have children work.
This study surveys the existing...
This study examines the contributions of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) between 1993 and 2001 to analysis, outreach, capacity building and training related to the role of rural finance in poverty reduction. The IFPRI multicountry research project on Rural Finance Policies for Food Security for the Poor involved data-intensive research by more than 14 research fellows...
Using data from fieldwork conducted in Nepal, the impact of a project designed to commercialise vegetables and fruits — the Vegetable and Fruit Cash Crop Program (VFC) — on male and female time allocation was examined. Using a rigorous time collection methodology, activity patterns in households that adopt and do not adopt the new technology were profiled.
Very few...
This study explores the impact of changes in environmental conditions on intrahousehold labour allocation to the collection of environmental goods such as fuelwood and leaf fodder for a sample of rural Nepali households. Using household-level panel data collected in 1982 and 1997, the study finds that household collection time significantly increases with measures of environmental resource...
This report presents information on the credit constraints that poor rural households face in nine countries of Asia and Africa (Bangladesh, Cameroon, China, Egypt, Ghana, Madagascar, Malawi, Nepal and Pakistan).
It uses this information to make the case for appropriate public intervention in strengthening rural financial markets and draws conclusions about areas where public resources...
This paper presents new evidence on the association between gender and poverty based on an empirical analysis of 11 data sets from 10 developing countries. The paper computes income- and expenditure-based poverty measures and investigates their sensitivity to the use of per capita and per adult equivalent units. It also tests for differences in poverty incidence between individuals in male-...
Climate change is damaging people’s lives today. Even if world leaders agree the strictest possible curbs on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the prospects are very bleak for hundreds of millions of people, most of them among the world’s poorest. This paper puts the dramatic stories of some of those people alongside the latest science on the impacts of climate change on humans....
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