Household Enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa - Why They Matter for Growth, Jobs, and Livelihoods

Fox, Louise; Sohnesen, Thomas Pave

doi:10.1596/1813-9450-6184

Cited by 77 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, in the developing countries, lack of access to credit is claimed to be the major constraint deterring the growth of small businesses and talented entrepreneurs. According to Somolekae (1996) and Fox (2012) microenterprise owners report that their topmost constraint on the start-up and expansion stage is the difficulty in obtaining credit services. Lack of collateral is the primary reason for not borrowing from banks.…”

Section: Enterprise Promotion and Employment Creationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Microfinance on Household Livelihoods: Evidence from Rural Eritrea

Habte

Visser

Ocran

2017

Development Finance

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Eritrea, a relatively young African nation, is one of the least developed countries in the world. Its economy is predominantly dependent on subsistence agriculture and the level and magnitude of poverty is more severe in rural areas. The formal financial sector is underdeveloped, state-owned, far from being competitive, and limited in terms of depth and breadth as measured by the relevant financial sector development indicators. To address the limitations of the formal banking sector and to help fill the financing gap, and improve the general livelihood of those at the lower income group, the Government of Eritrea introduced a Saving and Microcredit Programme (SMCP) in 1996 for which no scientific study measuring its impact has been done at the household level. The study was conducted in rural areas to find out whether the SMCP as a microfinance institution has improved the livelihood of its clients. The specific objectives of the study were to describe the characteristic feature of rural livelihoods in terms of the resources owned, the strategies pursued and outcomes achieved, identify and examine the determinants of household participation in the SMCP and finally assess the impact of participation in SMCP on household livelihoods. The study employed a quasi-experimental cross-sectional survey design involving structured and semistructured questionnaire administered to 500 respondents of whom 200 represented the treated group and 300 the controlled group. Logit regression was employed to identify the factors that determine household participation in the SMCP. In regard to this, age of the client household, household size, marital status, level of education of the client household, the size of first round loan, entrepreneurial experience, type of loan product offered by the institution, ownership of livestock and microenterprise, the perception of the client on involuntary deposits, the occurrence of a negative events (shock) to the household and village access to electricity were found to have statistically significant effect on the household"s probability to participate in the SMCP. Furthermore, the marginal effects were also computed to evaluate the contribution of each of these factors to the likelihood of participating in the SMCP. A propensity score matching model was applied to assess the impact of the programme on the livelihood of its clients. The findings reveal that participation in the SMCP has a significantly higher average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) households.Profits generated from off-farm and small microenterprises, the values of household and livestock assets, food and non-food consumption expenditures and nutrition quality, were ii found to be on average higher for the treated households than for the controlled households.

show abstract

Section: Enterprise Promotion and Employment Creationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Microfinance on Household Livelihoods: Evidence from Rural Eritrea

Habte

Visser

Ocran

2017

Development Finance

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Most of the recent studies that analyze the effects of self‐employment adopt a static view, using the poverty status, household income, or consumption as the dependent variable and focusing on the effect of being self‐employed rather than becoming self‐employed (Fox ; Fox and Sohnesen ). Other studies, which analyze vulnerability to poverty from a dynamic perspective, do not focus on self‐employment, and especially not on the different motivations behind becoming self‐employed (Arpino and Aassve ; Hoang, Pham, and Ulubaşoğlu ; Klasen, Lechtenfeld, and Povel ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Self‐Employment and Its Influence on the Vulnerability to Poverty of Households in Rural Vietnam—A Panel Data Analysis

Sohns

Diez²

2017

Geographical Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The following paper analyses whether becoming self‐employed can help to reduce the vulnerability to poverty of rural households. We use data collected during four survey waves in three rural provinces in Vietnam to calculate region‐specific logistic panel regressions. The results show that becoming self‐employed increases the likelihood of poor households escaping poverty, but only if they are located in a regional economic environment characterized by an advanced stage of structural change, good infrastructural conditions, and proximity to markets. In less well‐developed regions, becoming self‐employed is not sufficient to increase the probability of poor households escaping poverty. What matters more is that self‐employment is driven by opportunity and not by necessity. However, even opportunity‐driven self‐employment does not guarantee a reduction of vulnerability to poverty in all regional settings and for all household types. Especially, regional overspecialization in cash‐crop production and inequality in access to assets have to be taken into account. In times of declining commodity prices, self‐employment entails a risk of business failure in regions that are overspecialized in cash‐crop production. For households whose initial investment is high and whose endowment with social and educational assets is low, this can result in increased vulnerability to poverty.

show abstract

“…We hypothesized that family planning would lead to a 35% decrease in fertility rates so that the Malian fertility rate would drop to the Côte d'Ivoire rate of 2.2% (P3 and P4) ( Table 3). Creation of jobs outside of agriculture and educational programs to empower rural people can favour rural to urban migration (de Brauw et al, 2014;Fox and Sohnesen, 2012). We hypothesised that such policy intervention would lead to an increase of rural to urban migration rates up to 2.8% for all farm types (i.e.…”

Section: Agricultural Intensification and Policy Interventions: Explomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The size of the labour force therefore appears to be growing faster than economies can create job opportunities (Fox and Sohnesen, 2012) and agriculture will still have an important role to play in rural livelihoods.…”

Section: Pathways Out Of Poverty?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Policy interventions can favour these strategies, as examples from around Africa illustrate: large scale agricultural input subsidy programmes improved land productivity in Malawi (Dorward and Chirwa, 2011). Educational investment targeting rural areas and creation of non-agricultural wage jobs in the cities favoured rural-urban migration in Uganda (de Brauw et al, 2014;Fox and Sohnesen, 2012). In Rwanda and Kenya, family planning programs (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Trajectories of agricultural change in southern Mali

Falconnier

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Household Enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa - Why They Matter for Growth, Jobs, and Livelihoods

Cited by 77 publications

References 22 publications

The Impact of Microfinance on Household Livelihoods: Evidence from Rural Eritrea

The Impact of Microfinance on Household Livelihoods: Evidence from Rural Eritrea

Self‐Employment and Its Influence on the Vulnerability to Poverty of Households in Rural Vietnam—A Panel Data Analysis

Trajectories of agricultural change in southern Mali

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About