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Credit is essential in the farm business because it facilitates the adoption of productive technologies such as irrigation. However, access to credit remains a significant hurdle for sub-Saharan Africa, including Ghanaian farmers. Therefore, the authors assessed credit utilization and the intensity of borrowing by irrigated rice farmers in the Upper East region. In addition, how extension moderates the amount borrowed was analysed.

The multistage sampling approach was used in the study. The Tono and Vea irrigation schemes were purposively selected. Proportionally, 318 rice farmers were sampled from the Tono irrigation scheme and 159 from the Vea irrigation scheme. Cragg's double hurdle and moderation analysis were used.

It was uncovered that gender, age, years of farming, total farm size, rice farm size, contract farming and off-farm employment explain farmers' decision to borrow. On the other hand, the intensity of borrowing was influenced by gender, age, years of farming, rice farm size, contract farming and the number of extension contact. The moderation analysis revealed that extension contact improves the amount borrowed by farmers.

While there are irrigated rice farmers in other regions of Ghana, this study was limited to rice farmers under the Tono and Vea Irrigation schemes in the Upper East region.

This study investigated the moderating role of extension contact on amount borrowed in Ghana. This makes a modest addition to the limited literature on the moderating role of extension and credit access.

This paper investigates constraints to yield enhancing technology adoptions, highlighting credit using data pooled from the first three waves of the Ethiopian socio-economic surveys.

Direct elicitation methodology is used to identify household's non-price credit rationing status. The panel selection model specified to examine causal effects of credit constraint on adoption variables allows us to tackle self-selection into adoptions and potential endogeneity of credit constraint while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity in both the selection and main equations.

Results show that about 54% of sample households face credit rationing, predominantly demand-side risk rationing. There is a negative association between measures of credit constraint status and adoption variables. The effect is stronger when the demand-side credit rationing is accounted for and when within household variation in credit constraint status overtime is considered as opposed to across constrained and unconstrained households.

Expanding physical access to institutional credit alone may not necessarily spur increased uptake of credit and instant investment by farm households. For a majority of them to take advantage of available credit and improved technology, interventions should also aim at minimizing downside risks.

This paper incorporates the role of downside risk in influencing farmer's decisions to uptake credits and subsequently his/her adoption behaviors. The researcher approached the topic by state-of-the-art method which allows obtaining more reliable results and hence more specific contributions to research and practice.

Digital credit is spreading rapidly across Sub-Saharan Africa and holds potential for financial inclusion and female financial autonomy. Women in developing economies have long been targeted by microfinance institutions due to the women’s reliability and positive spillover effects. Yet, adoption rates for digital financial innovations remain moderate among rural women in Sub-Saharan Africa. The authors explore whether female preferences for digital and conventional credit differ from males.

The authors conduct a Discrete Choice Experiment with 420 smallholder farmers in central Madagascar, one of the region's poorest countries, to assess preferences for selected digital and conventional credit attributes.

Results of the mixed logit model and the comparison of the willingness-to-pay via Poe-test suggest high general demand for both credit forms. The demand of female respondents is higher than that of males, suggesting that they might be underserved. This holds for both credit forms. However, differences in willingness to pay for the credit attributes are mostly not statistically significant, indicating that designing gender-specific services may not be advisable.

This article is believed to be the first to assess and compare gendered willingness to pay for digital and conventional credit. The study’s findings give valuable insights to decision-makers in development politics as well as the fintech industry.

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.

Product quality standardization is the solution to market collapses due to quality-insensitive pricing regimes prevalent in West African (WA) rice value chains. However, access to local rice that is differentiated by quality standards is limited. This paper explores feasibility of quality standardization of local rice and evaluates how its price–quality connecting effect depends on retailer characters/reactions.

This study uses panel data from a wholesale randomized control trial (RCT) and three surveys of 135 rice retailers in Ghana.

Improved local food value chains and access to quality differentiated products are impactful entry points for import substitution policies. The strength of interretailer competition, retail infrastructure and wholesaler activities matter for a stronger connection of prices and quality, given uptake of quality-standardized local rice.

Access to quality-differentiated local rice can be increased via private and third-party certification. This addresses the prevailing inefficient pricing and its related problems. The positive impacts of such access would be magnified by designing quality certification interventions to elicit regular-frequent purchases by retailers and target retailers with adequate retail infrastructure in high competition areas. However, this study only explored profitability and opportunities for strategic behavior as the behavioral basis for quality-sensitive pricing. Other impact mechanisms could be explored in further research that includes consumer data.

Despite their difficulty and limited use in value chains studies, RCT and panel data methods are used. This study is the first to empirically analyze feasibility of introducing product standardization, a missing institution in the WA local rice markets.

This study examines the impact of agricultural credit on rice farmers' technical efficiency (TE) in Côte d'Ivoire by considering the heterogeneity among credit sources.

A multistage sampling technique was used to collect data from 588 randomly sampled rice farmers in seven rice areas of the country. The authors use the endogenous stochastic frontier production (ESFP) model to account for the endogeneity of access to agricultural credit.

On the one hand, agricultural credit has a significant and positive impact on rice farmers' TE. Rice farmers receiving agricultural credit have an average of 5% increase in their TE, confirming the positive impact of agricultural credit on TE. On the other hand, the study provides evidence that the impact of credit on rice production efficiency differs depending on the source of credit. Borrowing from agricultural cooperatives and paddy rice buyers/processors positively and significantly influences the TE, while borrowing from microfinance institutions (MFIs) negatively and significantly influences the TE. Moreover, borrowing from relatives/friends does not significantly influence TE.

Future research can further explore the contribution of agricultural credit by including several agricultural productions and using panel data.

The study provides evidence that the impact of agricultural credit on agricultural production efficiency depends on the source of credit. This study contributes to the literature on the impact of agricultural credit and enlightens policymakers in the design of agricultural credit models in developing countries, particularly Côte d'Ivoire.

This paper examines India's socio-economic attributes and different financial dimensions of financial inclusion (FI).

The paper uses a principal component analysis (PCA) to build indexes related to financial dimensions. It applies the logistics regression model and the Fairlie decomposition method to determine India's socio-economic and financial characteristics of FI.

Based on the logistic regression, socio-economic factors like age, gender, marital status, level of education and religion have an impact on FI. The use of financial institutions has positively contributed to the probability of FI, while the low proximity of financial service providers retards the process of FI. Fairlie decomposition concludes regional disparity and gender disparity in FI; however, the rural–urban gap in FI is not captured by the variables included in the study. The main reasons for the discrepancy are lack of education, financial literacy, the proximity of financial service providers and lack of financial institutions.

This paper makes two important contributions: first, it presents a micro-level analysis of FI across the socio-demographic strata of India, and second, it demonstrates the regional, rural–urban and gender disparity in FI in India.

The study aims to analyze, realize and identify the extent of research on financial literacy (FL) and to reveal the study trends, growth and evolution in the Scopus database from a bibliometric analysis. Principally, the primary purpose of this study is to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric review of studies focusing on the use, identification, network structure and conceptual structure of FL.

The most relevant articles were found using an electronic search. The studies that would be reviewed were sourced from the Scopus database. A total of 1,211 articles were found and refined to 768 papers between 1997 and 2021. Every composition has been analyzed in different dimensions such as co-authorship, co-citation, conceptual structure, co-word occurrence, trend topics analysis, thematic map, topic dendrogram, three field plot diagram and visualization analysis with the help of R programming language and VOSviewer software.

Motor themes, basic transverse, niche, and emerging and declining themes were identified using (Callon, 1991) a strategic thematic map. The analysis’s results showed that, over the past 20 years, FL literature has advanced remarkably. It also acts as a reference means for future researchers. This study adopted relational techniques such as co-word, co-author, co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling and thematic map analysis revealing the emerging topics for future research. The relational approach indicates that “FL” and “human” are two central parts that connect to other frequently used words in the studies examined.

The study deploys bibliometric analysis appropriate for deriving insights from the vast extant literature. However, a meta-analysis might offer deeper insights into specific dimensions of the research topic. It expands the previous literature and shows study topics that are more focused by examining the abstracts and contents of articles published in journals in different Scopus categories. For future researchers to derive a solid theoretical framework, a systematic review of the literature and meta-analysis would be helpful. Science mapping for this study is limited to the Scopus database owing to its more comprehensive coverage of good-quality journals.

For future researchers to derive a solid theoretical framework, a systematic review of literature and meta-analysis would be helpful. Science mapping for this study is limited to the Scopus database owing to its more comprehensive coverage of good-quality journals. The authors offer suggestions for promising directions for future research that could address some of the inconsistencies found from the bibliometric analysis study.

This study can help both budding and established researchers to find new research focus, relevant sources, and collaboration opportunities and make informed decisions. Findings related to evaluative and relational techniques can serve as helpful information for researchers who are new to the field.

It shows the indicators used to benchmark institutes, authors, journals or articles. The increase in researchers’ collaborative, multi-authored and interdisciplinary efforts also revealed an annual growth rate of 23.77%. Overall, this study enhanced the understanding of the FL phenomenon and provided an experience and interpret a wide range of publication- and citation-based statistics. This study contributes to understanding the collaborative networks of various researchers and institutions and the benefits/detriments of collaborating cross-disciplinary, internationally, or with industry or corporate institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors that shape the adoption of mobile phones for vegetable marketing by Vietnamese smallholders.

A structured questionnaire was given to 185 smallholders randomly chosen from 345 vegetable smallholders in the Vinh Thanh district of Vietnam. Descriptive statistics, inferential statistics and a binary logistic regression were applied to analyse the data.

The research results show that the smallholders’ adoption of mobile phones for vegetable marketing is significantly affected by their number of extension contacts, distance from smallholders’ homes to local markets, community-based organisation participation, gender, training/credit programme participation, age, education level, income and farm size (χ² = 143,111, p < 0.000).

A combination of factors related to socio-economic, situational and institutional characteristics of smallholders should be considered when promoting smallholders’ uptake of mobile phones for vegetable marketing in developing nations.

This research provides useful insights into the determinants of mobile phone adoption for vegetable marketing by smallholders and highlights areas that need to be considered when designing policies to improve the uptake of information and communication technologies in developing countries.

The researchers analyzed factors affecting the adoption of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green-building certification system in Jordan, including financial performance of certified projects along with broader barriers that may impact developers’ interest in LEED.

The authors first reviewed online data for all LEED registered and certified projects in Jordan, recruited LEED-certified project stakeholders, collected documents related to LEED projects and conducted LEED category credit summaries, financial cost-benefit analyses and spot-checking reported values in local markets. The authors then visited projects sites and interviewed various project stakeholders to understand better stakeholders' decision-making processes concerning LEED and relevant factors (financial, branding, cultural, political, etc.).

Obtaining LEED certification in Jordan was financially feasible as evinced in both the quantitative analysis and interviews. However, the authors found that there was very limited interest in LEED among Jordanian developers. Barriers included widespread cynicism toward green building concepts as well as a lack of local expertise in installing and maintaining green technologies. To overcome these barriers, the authors recommend that green building initiatives place a greater emphasis on education and public-promotion activities.

The research data were limited to projects that had successfully achieved LEED certification. Broader qualitative research conducted across the Jordanian building community could provide additional insights, but such an investigation is beyond the scope of the current study.

The complexity of adapting a Western green building standard (LEED) to a non-Western context is discussed in detail. The findings suggest that understanding regional development challenges, local markets and cultural differences is vital for successfully implementing green building certification systems.