Diverse Income Sources and Seasonal Finance for Smallholder Agriculture South Africa Partners          Start date 07/2000 End date 12/2001 Commitment (£) N/A   * Imperial College London, Faculty of Life Sciences, Department of Agricultural Sciences * Policy Research Programme, DFID * South African Collaborators -Dept of Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development, University of Pretoria, -ECI, South Africa -Land Bank, South Africa -Ithala, South Africa -UVIMBA, South Africa Contacts * Andrew Dorward, Director, Centre for Development and Poverty Reduction a.dorward@imperial.ac.uk Purpose To develop the SL framework's operational utility in addressing problems of access to seasonal financial assets by subsistence food crop producers. The project examines financial flows from households' farm and non-farm activities and investigates the potential scope for innovative seasonal lending and related micro finance activities in case study areas in South Africa.

	Lessons:
	Seasonal Finance for Staple Crop Production: Problems and Potential for Rural Livelihoods in sub Saharan Africa Andrew Dorward, Sibusiso Moyo, Gerhard Coetzee, Jonathan Kydd and Colin Poulton, April 2001 (Draft) PDF (1.7MB)
	Rural and Farmer Finance: An International Perspective (with particular reference to Sub Saharan Africa) Andrew Dorward, Colin Poulton, Jonathan Kydd. Paper presented at Workshop on Rural Finance Agricultural Economics Association of South Africa Conference, 19th September 2001 PDF
	Technical section of Project Memorandum PDF

Use of Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches

This project set out specifically to develop the SL framework to improve understanding of the seasonal finance arrangements and requirements of poor farmers in South Africa, and to identify new ways of delivering appropriate financial services to them. Livelihoods analysis applied to the literature review emphasises that rural livelihoods are more diversified than previously recognised and that the income share attributable to agriculture in the region is generally below 50 percent. The project proposed fieldwork using the livelihoods approach to clarify the link between off-farm income, demand for financial services, and seasonal requirements for farm inputs; to find out how far non-farm income substitutes for financial services, and the implications of this in isolated areas with little non-farm economy.

The fieldwork was designed also to investigate alternative institutional arrangements, involving a variety of commercial and other stakeholders, to improve the access of the rural poor to finance for seasonal inputs. The project thus set out to clarify the Policy, Institutions, and Processes regulating access to financial assets for poor farmers; to strengthen the SL framework’s links between “assets” and “PIPs”; and to identify the necessary macro-, meso- and mico conditions for the effective functioning of different institutional systems identified.