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The purpose of this paper is to investigate borrowing motivation, credit access barriers and their impacts on income of smallholder farmers engaging in cinnamon value chain development in Northwestern Vietnam.

A multistage sampling technique using a structural questionnaire and in-depth interviews was applied for collecting primary data from farmers and relevant stakeholders. The Propensity Score Matching was employed to analyze access barriers and examine whether relaxing these barriers can improve farmer income. To deal with the issue of model uncertainty and further increase the robustness of results, Bayesian model average and the bootstrapping approach were applied.

To fulfill the certain quality standards of cinnamon products which are later used in the medicinal and food industry, farmers as primary producers need credit for intensive investment to increase the value of their products. Still, there are 25.36 percent of farmers who have access constraints to formal credit. In the credit received group, 24.56 percent have not received full credit as demanded. Access problems are relevant to lack of collateral, lack of bank account holdings, inconvenient access to roads, weak chain linkage and limited organic farming. Removing credit access barriers can improve the income for farmers from cinnamon farming activities.

More detailed information on the conditions under which credit serves a more important role in creating value addition for cinnamon products can help the government establish more effective credit policies.

Great attention should be paid to smallholder farmers as primary producers in the chain for sustainable value chain development in developing and emerging economies. Policy interventions should facilitate access to bank accounts, speed up the process of granting residential land use certificates, certify organic farming and upgrade the road system. Strengthening the chain linkage can enhance smallholder farmers’ capacity to obtain credit through value chain lending development.

Empirical studies on agricultural credit from the perspective of value chain development remain scarce. A better understanding of credit access constraints allows for the positing of recommendations for policy makers to facilitate value chain lending and a medicinal plant-based agro-forestry system in similar situations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine farmers’ access to credit, credit constraint, and productivity in the Northern Savannah ecological zone of Ghana.

Secondary data from the Ghana Feed the Future baseline survey involving a total sample of 2,968 farm households were used. The conditional mixed process (CMP) framework was applied to estimate access to credit, credit constraint, and productivity simultaneously. As a system estimator the CMP corrects for possible heterogeneity and sample selection bias.

The results from the estimations revealed that age, literacy, farm non-mechanized equipment, and group membership were the variables influencing farmers’ access to credit. Credit constraint conditions were determined by household size, locality, group membership, and household durable assets. Finally, the results showed that productivity of farmers was dependent on marital status, household size, locality, farm size, commercialization, farm mechanized equipment, group membership, and household durable assets.

This paper is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to use the CMP framework to jointly estimate access to credit, credit constraint, and productivity. The results indicate that estimating credit access and constraint models separately would have yielded biased estimates. Thus, this paper informs future research on farmers’ credit access, credit constraint, and productivity for informed policymaking.

The Government of Pakistan has allocated a substantial proportion of agricultural credit to subsistence farmers. The purpose of this paper is to analyze farmers’ access to credit and its adequacy in the light of current agricultural credit policy of Pakistan.

The study has used both secondary and primary data for analysis. Secondary data were collected from the annual reports of Pakistan Economic Survey and State Bank of Pakistan. Primary data were collected from 168 subsistence farmers through households’ survey. Farmers’ credit access and credit adequacy were measured using credit access ratio and credit adequacy ratio, respectively. The Student’s t-test and analysis of variance were used to assess the differences in credit access and adequacy among farmers’ groups (i.e. upper, medium and lower subsistence farmers). Tobit regression model was employed to determine the factors influencing credit adequacy among farmers.

The empirical results revealed that the amount of credit provided to subsistence farmers was less than stated in the national agricultural credit policy. Upper subsistence farmers had more access to credit than lower and medium subsistence farmers. Lower subsistence farmers had above average access to informal sources of credit, and had below average access to formal sources. The findings also revealed that lower subsistence and medium subsistence farmers had the highest credit inadequacy of funds for investment in agriculture. The results of the Tobit regression revealed that age, education, experience, household size, total landholding of farmer and proportion of own land influenced the agricultural credit adequacy.

Most of the credit was distributed among the upper subsistence farmers. Lower subsistence farmers were still largely dependent on informal credit for farm production activities. The Government of Pakistan performed poor in the implementation of agricultural credit policy, and has failed to help subsistence farmers in their access to formal credit. It is needed to revamp the agricultural credit policy and facilitate credit acquisition by subsistence farmers, particularly for tenant farmers. It is important that the Government may classify the subsistence farmers into subgroups, and reallocate the funds accordingly. This study has lessons and implications for agricultural finance initiatives in developing countries.

Previous studies have focused primarily on access to agricultural credit. However, this study has adopted a holistic approach by using secondary and primary data to assess the farmers’ access to credit and adequacy. In addition, limited literature is available to explore the farmers’ accessibility and adequacy of agricultural credit. Furthermore, this study has focused exclusively on the farmers who are living in the flood-prone areas of Pakistan.

Several years after the regularization of microfinance activity in Côte d’Ivoire, smallholder farmers’ access to microfinance credits still remains marginal. The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze key determinants of access to microfinance credit in Sassandra-Marahoué District.

A total of 150 smallholder farmers were randomly sampled using an interview guide and semi-structured questionnaires. Univariate statistics and Probit binary modeling were employed for data analyses.

Results revealed that socio-economic/demographic characteristics of smallholder farmers and credit requirements imposed by microfinance institutions (MFIs) are key determinants of smallholder farmers’ access to microfinance credits in the district.

Although, the authors shed light on the determinants of microfinance credit access for smallholder farmers in this district, the study focused on a single source of financial credit. Future research will need to explore the determinants of credit demand and the choice between different sources of rural credits in Côte d’Ivoire.

The findings suggest that MFIs seldom take into account smallholder farmers who are not engaged in off-farm income-generating activities and savings account; and those with low level of education. Sensitization programs on the importance of savings mobilization and credit policy by MFIs will potentially increase smallholder’s knowledge on credit access requirements and thereby increased access.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study investigating determinants of smallholder farmers’ access to microfinance credits in Côte d’Ivoire specifically in the Sassandra-Marahoué District. The results of this study will serve as a guide for MFIs for improving smallholder farmers’ access to credit.

Rural farmers’ access to farm credit in Nigeria has been very low, which affects farm performance, and credit providers have blamed for the problem in the sector. While this general perception persists the fact may be the case of credit demand, rather than just the risk-averse attitudes of credit providers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate significant factors influencing farmers’ credit demand to ensure efficient credit provision.

The research adopted mixed methods for an in-depth investigation into the problem. There were 216 research participants split into equal halves of men and women from six local government areas of Nasarawa State. Data collection methods employed structured interviews, focus group discussions, close/open-ended and key informant interviews. Analytical tools involved descriptive statistics, the logit and multinomial logit models to determine participants’ socio-economic characteristics, sources of credit, access, factors influencing credit demand generally and from the various sources of credit identified.

Findings reveal only 47.6 per cent of the participants accessed credit, with fewer women accessing than men. The most accessed forms of credit are from the semi-formal sources, with more men accessing from formal sources and more women from non-formal sources. Factors having significant influence on credit demand generally are education, group membership and household size. And from formal, semi-formal and non-formal credit sources are education, information on sources of credit, deposits, household size and marital status; education, deposits, group membership, household size, flock size; and education, group membership, and gender from the non-formal credit providers, respectively.

Due to time constraint, this study data were collected concurrently with both quantitative and qualitative methods and did not allow for the interrogation of findings from one method with the other. In addition, the research categorised the agency of women based on marital status only as single or married and did not interrogate the agency of women further, this may be a limitation as some of the female participants are from polygamous homes.

Unlike the current concentration of Nigerian research of this kind with quantitative methods alone, this research contributes particularly to Nigerian research output and experience by triangulating both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore farmers sources of credit, access and factors determining access to credit in the study area.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of savings mobilization on access to credit among smallholder farmers’ in the Birim central municipality of Ghana.

A cross-sectional primary data set was used to estimate the factors influencing smallholder farmers’ access to credit and size of loan to be borrowed using the IV-Probit and IV-Tobit model.

The results of the study revealed that savings mobilization has a positive significant impact on access to credit and the total amount of credit one can borrow as well. Other control variables such as transaction cost and farm size depicted a negative significant impact on access to credit. Land ownership, member of an association, household size, years of farming experience and education also showed a positive significant impact on access to credit.

The paper only examined the savings effect on credit accessibility among smallholder farmers in one of the municipality’s in the Eastern region of Ghana. Future research should consider all or many municipality for an informed generalization of findings.

This paper provides evidence that smallholder farmers knowledge on the financial market is poor and it would require the policymakers or NGOs to organize financial management training programs so that the farmers high ignorance of the financial market will significantly reduce.

Although existing studies have examined smallholder farmers’ access to credit, the unique contribution of this paper is the analysis of the impact of saving mobilization on credit accessibility in Ghana, a major access to credit determinant in the financial market. In addition, those researchers who factored in savings as an access to credit determinant did not also consider the casual relationship between these two variables, thus, the present of endogeneity of which this paper does.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors affecting the adoption of agricultural technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically the role of credit market inefficiency in adoption of agricultural technologies in the region.

Most importantly, the paper applies a 2SLS model on a unique data set on nine agrarian countries from Sub-Saharan Africa’s intensification of food crops agriculture (Afrint) to provide evidence on how credit market inefficiency affects adoption of technologies in the sub region.

The study finds that the relationship between credit and technology adoption is one-way causal relation (i.e. credit access leads to technology adoption) as opposed to a two-way relation (i.e. mutual dependent relation). Further, the results indicate that credit market inefficiency can be a major barrier to the adoption of yield enhancing technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Further, the study showed mixed results for household variables. The results give credence to studies that highlight the importance of infrastructure and risk control in the adoption of new technologies.

The study is limited to only nine countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, the findings and interpretations should be considered as such. Further, there is the need for further research that considers all the region so as to establish whether or not there is a relationship between credit market inefficiencies and technology adoption in the region.

The policy implication is that microfinance institutions should consider scaling up their credit services to ensure that more households benefit from it, and in so doing technology adoption will be enhanced.

The main contribution of the study lies in its use of a unique data set from Sub-Saharan Africa’s intensification of food crops agriculture (Afrint) to investigation relationship between credit market inefficiency and technology adoption.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to determine the factors contributing to farm income in the Transitional and Savanna zones of Ghana and to ascertain variations between in the same and across the two locations; and to determine the impact of credit on farm income in each of the two zones and to ascertain the variation in impact of credit across the two locations.

In order to address endogeneity and sample selection bias, the authors draw from the theory of impact evaluation in nonrandom experiment, employing the endogenous switching regression (ESR) while using the propensity score matching (PSM) to check for robustness of the results.

The results show significant mean differences between some characteristics of households that have access to credit and those that did not have access. Further, the results revealed farm size, labor; gender, age, literacy, wealth and group membership as the significant determinants of both credit access and income in the two zones. With the ESR, credit access increases households farm income by GH¢206.56/ha and GH¢39.74/ha in the Transitional and Savanna zones, respectively, but with the PSM, credit increases farm income by GH¢201.50 and GH¢45.69 and in the Transitional and Savanna, respectively.

The mean differences in characteristics of the households revealed the presence of selection bias in the distribution of household’s covariates in the two zones. The results further indicate the importance of productive resources, information and household characteristics in improved access to credit and farm income. Also, the results from both methods indicate that credit access leads to significant gains in farm income for households in both zones. However, differences exist in the results of PSM and that of the ESR results.

The presence of selection bias in the samples suggests that the use of ESR and PSM techniques is appropriate. Further, the results suggesting that enhanced credit access and farm income could be attained through improved access to household resources and information. The results also suggest the need for establishing and expanding credit programs to cover more households in both zones. The differential impact of credit between the two methods employed in each zone revealed the weakness of each model. The low values from PSM could indicate the presence of selection bias resulting from unobservable factors whiles the high values from the ESR could stem from the restrictive assumption of the model. This reinforces the importance of combining mixed methods to check robustness of results and to explore the weakness of each method employed.

The novelty of this study lies in the use of a very extensive and unique data set to decompose the determinants of credit access and farm income and as well as the impacts of credit into zones.

The main purpose of this paper is to establish the mediating effect of credit counselling in the relationship between access to microcredit and survival of micro small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa post COVID-19 pandemic with data collected from rural Uganda.

Structural equation modelling (SEM) through SmartPLS 4.0 was used to generate the standardized parameters to test whether credit counselling mediates the relationship between access to microcredit and survival of MSMEs in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa post COVID-19 pandemic with data collected from rural Uganda.

The SEM bootstrap results revealed that credit counselling enhances access to microcredit by 27% to promote survival of MSMEs in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa post COVID-19 pandemic with data collected from rural Uganda.

The current study focused only on women MSMEs. Future studies may possibly collect data from all the MSMEs to draw better generalization of the findings within the sector.

The findings can help public finance policy to ensure provision of credit counselling to microentrepreneurs who borrow from different financial institutions to reduce the problem of loan defaults and delinquency rampant in lending. This could be done through conducting routine business education and counselling sessions for microentrepreneurs who often need credit to grow their businesses.

This study is amongst the first few studies to establish the mediating effect of credit counselling in the relationship between access to microcredit and survival of MSMEs in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa in the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic with data collected from rural Uganda. There is a dearth in literature and theory on the rehabilitative and preventive role of credit counselling in reducing repayment defaults amongst borrowers within the credit market to spur survival of MSMEs seen as the main enabler of economic growth, especially in developing countries. In fact, credit counselling acts as a safety net by substituting financial literacy and education to solve the rampant problem of overindebtedness amongst borrowers who are debt illiterate within the credit market.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate if access to local branch infrastructure of the farm credit system institutions (FCS), banks and credit unions (BCU), and alternative financial services (AFS) providers is related to the use of credit from non-traditional lenders (NTLs). The focus is on beginning and women operators who are typically credit constrained and thus more likely to suffer from closures of bank branches and consolidation of traditional agricultural lenders.

Informed by Detragiache et al. (2000), the authors specify farmers’ use of loans as a function of their access to credit (measured by the branch density of each lender type) along with operator’s and operation’s controls. The measures of loans by NTLs (number, use, share and lender type) require the use of Poisson, Probit, Tobit and Multinomial Logit techniques. This study utilizes individual producer data from the 2018 Agricultural Resource Management Survey and 2018 county-level branch density data for FCS, BCU and AFS providers.

Access to credit from FCS is helpful to BFRs only, while access to AFS is associated with the use of loans from NTLs by women but not by BFRs. As expected, access to BCU credit matters for the use of loans from NTLs, with a complementary effect for BFRs but a substitution effect for women’s use of such loans.

There are no studies on local agricultural credit markets in the US that evaluate the implications from changes in access to credit on credit-constrained borrowers and their use of NTLs’ credit.