Feast and Famine: Financial Services for Rural Kenya

Gem Argwings-Kodhek, Mary Kwamboka and Francis Karin

No 55160, Food Security Collaborative Working Papers from Michigan State University, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics

Abstract: The paper gives a brief description of the history and main institutional forms in the agricultural and rural financial services sector–commercial banks, the micro-finance industry, savings and credit cooperative societies, village banks, building societies and the Agricultural Finance Corporation. It ends by raising some of the issues that need to be addressed as we begin to deal with the institutional and regulatory framework for the subsector including the cost of funds and the array of existing policy and legislative proposals on the table. The main argument of the paper is that we need to step back and undertake a comprehensive assessment of the sector before government passes new laws, or spends public money in unproductive ways. The paper proposes that the agriculture sector ministries should play a leading role in pushing for that comprehensive assessment.

Keywords: Agricultural; Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38
Date: 2004
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/55160/files/wp12.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:midcwp:55160

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.55160

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Food Security Collaborative Working Papers from Michigan State University, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().