Improving rural Malawian households’ access to credit

Although several country-level studies have investigated the impact of access to credit on various outcome variables, few of these have looked at the full effect of membership in a credit programme. The study in this book was conducted on a Malawian dataset that was collected through a household rural finance survey. The study differs from others in that the operative explanatory variable is not monetary credit but credit programme membership. Contrary to findings in other related studies, this book finds that the effect of membership does not depend on the gender of the household head. Credit programme membership, regardless of the gender of the household head, was found to make households better off, as manifested by the significantly lower food shares of member households. Female-headed households, irrespective of their membership status, were found to spend significantly more on food than their male-headed counterparts. This book should add to the discourse on the welfare effect of microcredit programmes and be of interest to development economists, or policymakers assessing the benefits of improving credit access to households.