 Inventory credit to enhance food security in Burkina FasoTristan Le Cotty, Maître d’Hôtel, Elodie and Julie Subervie World Development, 2023, vol. 161, issue C Abstract: In many African countries, rural households typically sell their crops immediately after the harvest, and then face severe food shortages during the lean season. This paper explores whether alleviating both credit and storage constraints through an inventory credit (or warrantage) program is associated with improvements in household livelihood. We partnered with a rural bank and a nation-wide organization of farmers to evaluate a warrantage program in seventeen villages in Burkina Faso. In randomly chosen treatment villages, households were offered a loan in exchange for storing a portion of their harvest as a physical collateral in one of the newly-built warehouses of the program. We found that the program has, on average, increased cultivated area in treated villages (mainly cotton and maize), fertilizer use, cattle and grain stock at the end of lean season (millet). Although much less robust, the results of the estimations concerning the direct users of the system further suggest that warrantage may have extended the self-subsistence period of about two weeks and increased dietary diversity, with more fruit consumed weekly. Keywords: Inventory credit; Warrantage; Intertemporal price fluctuations; Storage; Savings (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:161:y:2023:i:c:s0305750x22002820 DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.106092 Access Statistics for this article World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes More articles in World Development from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.