ABSTRACT
International interventions in Gambian agriculture have been based mainly on credit. Each year, with mixed motives, new committees in public and private agencies convene in Banjul, the capital, to seek new ways of extending loans into the countryside. Farmers need not just loans, but also more and better opportunities for savings, partly to reduce their dependency on borrowing. In The Gambia, virtually everything is lendable, including land, labor, livestock, seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, and farm tools. Every Gambian village normally has one or more groups of the kinds known in Mandinka as kafo. Kafo groups handle money in various fiduciary ways. Contribution clubs for money are a newer idea in rural parts of The Gambia than kafo groups for labor. The experiences of private voluntary organizations in The Gambia, as elsewhere in Africa, suggest that loans to women are not necessarily harder to collect than loans to men.
