The safety net provided by the African extended family has traditionally been the basis for the assertion that “there is no such thing as an orphan in Africa” (Foster 2000). The assumption is that even families lacking sufficient resources to properly care for existing members are...

Drawing on original fieldwork in the slums of Ndola in Northern Zambia we study the role of family structure in caring for vulnerable children. We try to isolate those features of a child’s nuclear and extended family that put him most at risk of ending up on the streets. We find that older,...

Drawing on original fieldwork in the slums of Ndola in Northern Zambia we isolate those features of a child's nuclear and extended family that put him most at risk of ending up on the streets. We find that older, male children and particularly orphaned children are more likely to wind up on the...

All over the world, women have less access to credit than men. Because of both discriminatory property laws and unwritten social customs, women are less likely than men to own high-value assets that can be used as collateral to secure loans. Financial institutions in developing countries rely on...

The challenges faced by women-owned enterprises in the developing world are substantial. Only one-third of the world’s SMEs in the formal sector are currently run by women, and women owned businesses typically underperform men’s. Across countries and contexts, access to finance is...

In October 2012, the Government of Ethiopia launched the Women Entrepreneurship Development Project (WEDP), with the aim of increasing the earnings and employment of growth-oriented micro and small enterprises (MSEs) owned or partly-owned by women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia. In doing so, it...

This case study tells the story of the evolution of psychometric credit scoring as an innovative solution in a World Bank operation, from its humble beginnings as a small pilot in Ethiopia, to the current movement to replicate its use for similar challenges in countries across the continent in...

In absence of deposit insurance, underdeveloped financial systems can exhibit a coordination failure between banks, unable to commit on safe asset holding, and depositors, anticipating low deposit repayment in bad states. This paper shows conditions under which a government can solve this...

Financial regulation affects government revenue whenever it imposes both the mandatory quantity and price of government bonds. This paper studies a banking regulation adopted by the National Bank of Ethiopia in April 2011, which forces all private banks to purchase a fixed negative-yield...

This paper investigates the short-run consumption expenditure dynamics and the interaction of public and private arrangements of ultra-poor and labor-constrained households in Malawi using an original dataset from the Mchinjii social cash transfer pilot project (one of the first experiments of...