George Ayittey’s Indigenous African Institutions presents a detailed and convincing picture of pre-colonial and post-colonial Africa - its cultures, traditions, and indigenous institutions, including participatory democracy.

This book examines engagements with financial services in contexts of conflict. Using Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as case studies, it explores informal financial and business strategies and how these shift during conflict. Through a combination of regression analyses and panel data modeling with fixed effects, the project research indicates that conflict has a stronger effect on the nature of demand for credit and savings services than it has on the actual performance of financial institutions. In examining these patterns, the importance of networks and family becomes increasingly important—not just in the ways they are important to us as individuals, but as important determinants of post-war outcomes.

Explores and challenges existing conventions of inequality in Africa while offering new insights to explain persistent poverty across the continent.

Leading scholars examine political, legal, social, and market institutions through a microeconomic lens.

Microfinance has become an important component of development, poverty reduction and economic regeneration strategy around the world. By the early twenty first century tens of millions of people in more than 100 countries were accessing services from formal and semi-formal microfinance institutions (MFIs). Much of the initial attention on microcredit came through work on Bangladesh’s much-lauded Grameen Bank but, there are now many different ‘models’ for microfinance and many countries have substantial microfinance sectors. This timely book, written by one of the major players in the UK in development economics explores, amongst others, topics such as: microfinance and poverty reduction microfinance, gender and social development microinsurance regulating and supervising microfinance institutions. Topical and insightful, this important text examines what has become a vast global industry employing hundreds of thousands of people and attracting the attention of large numbers of governments, banks, aid agencies, non-governmental organizations and consultancy firms.