Publication: Locking Crops to Unlock Investment: Experimental Evidence on Warrantage in Burkina Faso
Date
2022-09-30
ISSN
Published
2022-09-30
Author(s)
World Bank
Abstract
Smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan
Africa face an array of challenges to realizing higher
profits from their agricultural activities, including lack
of adequate storage facilities and credit market
imperfections. To address these constraints, warrantage, an
innovative inventory credit system, offers farmers the
opportunity to both store their crop production and access
credit simultaneously. In a study in Burkina Faso, a
research team worked with 38 villages to look at the impacts
of warrantage on a variety of household and agricultural
outcomes when given access to storage warehouses in close
proximity villages. With additional cash on hand from
increased revenues, households with access to the warrantage
scheme invested more in education, increased their livestock
holdings, and invested more in agricultural inputs for the
following year. No impacts were found on food expenditures
or on food security indicators. These findings suggest that
warrantage systems, when established through trusted
community institutions, can positively influence household
incomes and farmers’ investment behavior.
Citation
“World Bank. 2022. Locking Crops to Unlock Investment: Experimental Evidence on Warrantage in Burkina Faso. © Washington, DC: World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/38268 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”