ABSTRACT
Informal monetary movements across the rural-urban interface may take a range of forms. They can include rural to rural, rural to urban, urban to rural and urban to urban. Montgomery et al. (1996) report that the informal financial markets in Bangladesh were estimated at approximately two-thirds of the total during the 1980s, indicating the importance of this source of credit. By contrast, in Kenya, Buckley (1996) found that only one respondent of his study of rural credit reported using an African private money lender, while the few other cases that were disclosed involved Kenyan-Asian money lenders, with one respondent quoted as saying: ‘Asians do it because they were not African’ (1996: 285). This suggests that access to rural informal credit sources is highly variable.
