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Rural Women’s Access to Financial Services: Credit, Savings, and Insurance

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Gender in Agriculture

Abstract

This chapter reviews rural women’s access to financial services, a key factor underlying many successful rural development strategies. Designing appropriate financial products for women to be able to save, borrow, and insure is essential to strengthen women’s role as producers and widen the economic opportunities available to them. Context-specific legal rights, social norms, family responsibilities, and women’s access to and control over other resources play an important role in shaping rural women’s needs for capital and their ability to obtain it. The chapter argues that interventions that improve rural women’s direct access to financial services—not mediated through their husbands—can be beneficial on two fronts. First, by addressing the constraints women face, these interventions enhance women’s productive capacity. Second, by improving women’s relative power in their households, these interventions can lead to both a more efficient allocation of resources and to improved health, nutrition, and education in their families, all of which are expected to improve long-term production capabilities. The products and service delivery models introduced to address some of the constraints faced by women include technical innovations that improve access to existing financial services, changes in product design to better tailor products to women’s preferences and constraints, and the development of new products such as micro-insurance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As documented, for example, in Aryeetey’s (1995) description of seed technology diffusion in Ghana.

  2. 2.

    This lack of clarity and transparency enables employees responsible for loan approvals to frame them as special favors that women are often unable to repay. The most common forms of repaying such favors—such as inviting loan officials for a drink or for dinner or the giving of bribes—are not considered acceptable behavior for women (Ospina 1998; Lycette and White 1989).

  3. 3.

    The situation can be exacerbated in polygamous households where, as Oni (1996) points out, senior wives can experience reduced security as their husbands allow their favorite and likely more recent wives more access to resources.

  4. 4.

    Where women’s relative power in the family is approximated by the assets women brought to the marriage, women’s share of family assets or income, women’s borrowing, women’s access to credit, and women’s credit limit, relative to men’s.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Monitoring and Evaluation, Landesa, 1424 Fourth Ave., Suite 300, Seattle, WA, 98101, USA

    Diana Fletschner (Director of Research)

  2. Department of Geography, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada

    Lisa Kenney (PhD Student)

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  1. Diana Fletschner
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Correspondence to Diana Fletschner .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division, International Food Policy Research Inst., Washington, District of Columbia, USA

    Agnes R. Quisumbing

  2. Environment and Production Technology Division, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, District of Columbia, USA

    Ruth Meinzen-Dick

  3. The State of Food and Agriculture, Agricultural Development Economics Division, Economic and Social Development Department, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy

    Terri L. Raney

  4. Agricultural Development Economics Division, Economic and Social Development Department, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy

    André Croppenstedt

  5. Department of Sociology, New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Julia A. Behrman

  6. Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

    Amber Peterman

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Fletschner, D., Kenney, L. (2014). Rural Women’s Access to Financial Services: Credit, Savings, and Insurance. In: Quisumbing, A., Meinzen-Dick, R., Raney, T., Croppenstedt, A., Behrman, J., Peterman, A. (eds) Gender in Agriculture. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8616-4_8

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