A Practitioners Guide
Rural financial services vary in scale and objective. Community-based savings and lending groups, for example, make small but essential amounts of money available to their members. Where agricultural production, processing and marketing is more capital intensive the demand for more formal financial service providers is stronger.
This Agrodok describes current savings, lending, and insurance practices, identifies the service providers working in the informal, semiformal and formal sector and discusses current approaches and methodologies. It targets those who want to know more about rural finance as well as development practitioners concerned with identifying the financial services most appropriate for their project or organisations.
Version 1, 2008