This paper examines whether shareholder-owned MFIs financially and socially perform better than NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We also investigate the role of institutional quality in altering MFIs’ incentives and behavior in determining outreach. Our results indicate that NGOs are more...

This paper addresses the relevance of agricultural seed systems in terms of the production and dissemination of seed in the context of adaptation to climate change. Using nationwide household level data from Malawi, we examine the hypothesis that climatic shocks increase small-scale farmers’...

Does financial development enable economic growth in developing countries? We find evidence for this in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where there is an urgent need to promote growth. Using a modern time series methodology and data for 22 countries over the period from 1960 to 2009, we find...

Microfinance is seen as a key development tool, and despite the current deepening crisis within the industry, it continues to grow in sub-Saharan Africa. We systematically reviewed the evidence of the impacts of micro-credit and micro-savings on poor people in sub-Saharan Africa. We considered...

We use panel survey data and household event-histories to explore patterns of rural poverty dynamics in Kenya over the period 2000–2009. We find substantial mobility across poverty categories using economic transition matrices. Drawing on asset-based approaches, we distinguish stochastic from...

The Financial Action Task Force embraces financial inclusion as complementary to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing, as it enhances transparency. This support is based on the premise that the increased use of formal financial services leads to a reduction of usage of informal...

Historical evidence from the industrialized world suggests that the expansion of the modern state’s capacity to tax eventually led to more democratic and less corrupt governments. Using a dataset that covers 31 sub-Saharan African countries over the 1990–2005 period, we study whether the...

As in many other francophone African countries, there has been increased privatization of the school system in Burkina Faso since the 1990s, especially in urban areas. Based on a unique retrospective survey conducted in Ouagadougou, this research investigates a largely unexplored issue in...