Catalina Diaz

Biosummary: Assistant scientist at IRRI working in impact assessment of technology and credit in poverty and women’s welfare and farmer participatory research. She is currently studying towards a Ph.D in Community Development at the University of Los Baños in the Philippines. She has an MS in Rural Sociology and BS in Agricultural Economics both from the University of Los Baños.

Title: "Reaching the poor with effective micro credit: Evaluation of a Grameen replication in the Philippines." Co-author: Mahabub Hossain

Theme: 2C

Abstract:

The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has developed a successful model of reaching credit to resource poor households that are generally bypassed by government financial institutions. This paper evaluated the experience of the replication of the model in the Philippines by the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development (CARD), an NGO which has disbursed P82 million to 8000 borrowers since 1990, and has succeeded in recovering the entire amount. Analysis of the data collected from 133 sample household borrowers suggests that for the enterprises financed with credit, the productivity of labor was higher than the wage rate and the rate of return on capital was higher than the interest charged on the loan. The credit contributed to 25 percent increase in household incomes. The institution however is not yet financially viable, as the cost of operation is about 54 percent of the amount of outstanding loan. Without high rates of interest, the microcredit operation will not be able to expand their operations on a large enough scale to have significant impact on poverty alleviation.

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