ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews rural sources of credit and credits relative importance in the smallholder farming system. It demonstrates how formal and informal credit is a valuable component of the smallholder farming system, especially insofar as it has the capacity to contribute to a household's food security resilience. Credit is a livelihood resource. The chapter examines issues of gendered access and entitlement to this resource, whether from sources formal or informal. Men in Makueni County generally reported that the money they received from petty trading and the selling of agricultural products first came to them, and then they would give it to their wives in the form of petty cash or allowances for grocery items. If credit plays a productive role in making the smallholder farming system more socially and ecologically resilient, then the system can only get increasingly more stable when sources of credit are couched in social terms.
