Small ruminants and financial security in rural Nigeria

We are pleased to release our newest working paper, from IMTFI researchers Isaac and Titilayo Oluwatayo on the use of small ruminants, like goats, as a form of financial security among women in rural Nigeria. From the authors:

We realised that small ruminants’ husbandry play a very crucial role in the lives of residents of rural Nigeria and this is because small ruminants provide the easiest and readily accessible source of credit available to meeting immediate and urgent social and financial obligations especially among the vulnerable women. Findings from our recent study show that rural women are involved in the rearing of small ruminants - sheep and goats especially around homes by feeding them kitchen wastes or most times leave them to graze on surrounding herbs and shrubs.  Primary data collected through administration of structured questionnaire and relevant secondary information gathered from livestock institutions in the study area were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics.  The results of the analysis revealed that 58.7 percent of the respondents had farming as their primary occupation. Analysis of respondents based on the types of livestock raised showed that goat was the most preferred with about 72 percent of respondents indicating it as their favourite and this is unconnected with the fact that consumption and marketability of goat has no religious/ethnic/cultural restrictions. Next to this is poultry (53.5 percent) and the least preferred among the livestock is swine. The result further revealed that 67.7 percent of the respondents utilised part of the income generated from small ruminants’ rearing to meet the welfare needs of their members and settle unforeseen financial demands such as paying hospital bills (10.4 percent) and assisting relations in emergency situations (7.8 percent).  However, education and poverty status of respondents were found to be important determinants of revenue realised from small ruminants. Going by our findings, we therefore recommend that efforts should be geared at building capacity of respondents through education since respondents with formal education were better able to monetise their animals and get better returns. Also, sensitization on family planning and improvement on existing infrastructural facilities in the study area are very important in boosting the financial status of the women.

Click here to read the paper! 

Funny Money Roundup 3: On Wall Street, the Great Recession, and the Occupy Movements, Part 1

Welcome back to the occasional link collection we here at IMTFI call the Funny Money Roundup. This installment focuses on the Occupy movements that have sprung up around the United States and around the world over the past several months. Part 1, below the break, shares links from our archive on the Occupy movements. Part 2 will look at the recession and Wall Street generally. As always, what follows is idiosyncratic and incomplete. If you’d like to share a link or several, please send them to Taylor Nelms at tnelms@uci.edu.

Informal Credit Associations in Lucknow, India

Zardozi embroiderers

We are pleased to announce the release of our most recent working paper, authored by IMTFI researcher Syed Aiman Raza, assistant professor of Anthropology at Shia P.G. College in Lucknow, India. Dr. Raza's research focuses on informal credit associations among Zardozi embroidery workers in Lucknow.

Trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty, the poor are unable to think much about their future. This creates a situation in which the education of the children, health of the household members is often compromised with. Each day of their life is spent struggling to earn a living for the family. They often work for more than 8 hours a day, earning less than two dollar and even sometimes less. These impacts are invisible, but in the truest sense – are irreversible for the dent they make in the future of their families. Their choices are minimal which makes it impossible for them to plan out expenditure and calculate one’s own capacity to save or repay. 

The present study is an ethnographic account of the Shia population attached to Zardozi (embroidery) in Lucknow, who are reeling under intense poverty and suffering as a result of pittance. This study contributes to the linking of micro levels of analysis of money management through informal financial network of Rotating Services and Credit Association (ROSCA), popularly known as Beesi, among the poor skilled Zardozi (embroidery) workers in Lucknow. The research facilitates verbatim accounts of embroidery workers about what they want ,what they expect of themselves and how they make their choices that they can make. The study is open to a wide spectrum of readers belonging to developmental studies, economics and microfinance who are interested in understanding real life situations confronted by the poor in third world countries.

Click here to read it! 

Gender, Cash, and the Mobile in Papua New Guinea

We are happy to share our most recent working paper, written by Supriya Singh and Yaso Nadarajah: "School Fees, Beer and 'Meri': Gender, Cash, and the Mobile in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea". From the abstract:

We combine the perspectives of the anthropology and sociology of money with user-centred design to explore how the use of cash in rural and remote Papua New Guinea will shape the use of mobile money. Drawing on 13 open-ended interviews, group interviews involving 100 persons, and participant observation over two visits to Morobe province in 2010 and 2011, we found cash is used for school fees, mobile phones, household goods, transport, beer, cards, women and gifting to wantok, that is, people connected by descent or place. Cash is individually controlled and women’s savings are often hidden in pandanus walls or locked cupboards. Women control cash from gardens and the re-selling of betel nuts and cigarettes. Men take the larger share of cash from coffee and control the ‘big money’ from mining. Mobile money, if appropriately designed, can reinforce the privacy and security of cash and savings, facilitate gifting to wantok, and lead to greater financial inclusion of women.

Click here to read our working paper!

Jan Chipchase at CGAP Clients at the Center

by IMTFI External Advisory Board member Jan Chipchase

Getting A Shave: Lagos, Nigeria by Jan Chipchase

What struck me about the recent CGAP Clients at the Center Convening Event in Washington DC on December 1, 2011 was the extent to which its focus  – to better understand customers, to turn customer insights into something that meaningfully changes the products/services being offered – is echoed by the challenges faced by our commercial clients. 

Pretty much every organisation recognises the need to understand their customers – whether it's to better serve their existing needs; deliver new products and services; or slightly less charitably to understand how responsive they are going to be to changes in price. There are many ways to gain a rich and nuanced understanding of the customer – and increasingly people are turning to rich ethnographic studies to compliment more data driven approaches. 

For consumer research to be impactful it needs to: have a clear client in the organisation – someone with a stake in its outcome; it needs to be soluble – in a format fit for consumption; and most importantly needs to inform and inspire the organisation beyond what it knows. Basic I know, but so-often missing when the person commissioning the research or the team that implements it lacks imagination and the willingness to put themselves on the line. Good research will communicate basic drivers, segmentation models, can reframe the value proposition; all the way through to the positioning of the brand. This is only part of the story – the organisation needs to be structured in such a way to take advantage of what they learn – the decision makers need to be in the room to absorb and act on the results.

The IMTFI is funding new projects – looking forward to researchers pushing the boundaries for another year.

CGAP Deputy CEO, Alexia Latortue has a full write-up of the event.

Funny Money Roundup 2

Another roundup of funny money, courtesy of IMTFI research assistant Taylor Nelms:

• I’m currently doing research in Quito, Ecuador, and after being mugged on a previous trip, I started putting a folded $20 or $10 bill in my shoe to have a bit of cash for a taxi if it happens again.

Now I know what to call it. Learn about the history of “mad money.” (h/t Eva)

Liz Losh's Guest Blog: Desires and Needs

As Director Bill Maurer wrapped up the annual conference about Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine, he thanked the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and discussed how the donor and aid communities were adapting to collaborations with the investment community. He also said that the profits associated with a "world of fees and commissions" should be understood in relationship to the products and practices of "cultural worlds." Like landlord and tenant relationships, mobile money relationships often do not function with "free agents in an open market," even though ideologies of freedom and openness may be featured in advertising and project reports. Maurer argued that "researching the interface" and developing "different kinds of vocabularies" were important areas for systematic research.

Maurer showed some of the illustrations gathered by Jane Guyer in her project documenting Wikipedia's illustrations of the entry on "Market." Although he showed farmers displaying cabbage and the London corn exchange from Guyer's collection, he argued that conventional representations of a market as a site that sets price through supply and demand was little more than a nostalgic imaginary construction that did little to foster understanding of how mobile money actually operates. As he said, "the world of fees and commissions is coming into contact with a social world with things that look like this but aren't." Instead, he asserted that refugee camps might be the best example of the general concepts discussed at the conference, as the image of a Somali refugee camp replaced the commercial and pastoral images shown earlier. As Maurer put it, "let's pluralize 'the market' into multiple intersecting circuits of finance."

In discussing behavior change around mobile money, Maurer also insisted that it was important not to overlook "the importance of fun and enjoyment," because it was "easy to think of the poor as just having needs and not having desires." He also reminded audience members that "the poor don't aspire to be entrepreneurs necessarily" and encouraged them to think about Melissa Cliver's work on "economies of enoughness."