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Non-PR, IFPRI1; CRP4; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; G Cross-cutting gender theme; Capacity Strengthening, PHND; A4NH, CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), Studies on credit schemes for small-scale entrepreneurs have documented their potential to alleviate poverty and improve food security, nutrition, and health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. Other studies find mixed impacts of credit schemes on reducing income inequality, empowering women, and enhancing children’s education. Moreover, growing evidence finds that entrepreneurs offer credit to customers; little is known about what this practice means for entrepreneurs, and even less about gendered differences in this practice. Herein, we consider the case of final retailers in agricultural value chains and examine how male and female informal milk vendors from peri-urban Nairobi borrow and sell on credit, and how these experiences affect their businesses where there are few formal safeguards to ensure repayment. In 2017, we conducted 49 individual interviews, four key informant interviews, and six focus groups with men and women who were current or former milk vendors. A thematic analysis revealed that vendors sell on credit to appeal to customers, which may be advantageous when vendors need to rid themselves of milk before it spoils, regardless of gender. With few strategies to recoup costs from customers who fail to repay, however, failure to collect debt may cause default for vendors who acquired milk via informal borrowing. The consequences are likely more severe for women vendors, who generally have less capital to fall back on relative to men. Development organizations should identify gender-sensitive financial services that can help entrepreneurs maintain viable businesses despite the volatility of borrowing and selling on credit.

Sahelian pastoralists use mobility, diversification, and even pluriactivity as main adaptation strategies to the asymmetrical distribution of multifaceted resources. Complex relations vis-à-vis this risky environment hide slowing transitions from a traditional inward-looking to an outward-looking economy, which is characterised by increasing use of a remunerated workforce. The growing commodification of the economy of Sahelian pastoralists could generate new forms of uncertainty. The authors of this paper use a principal-agent model to analyse the remunerated workforce and demonstrate the mixed results of this strategy in the context of structural risk in the Sahel. The authors then highlight the conditions under which trust and reputation are developed to stabilise employment relations and better cope with and/or mitigate various shocks.

Many research and development institutions advocate the integration of economic sectors to markets to benefit from them and reduce poverty. This is not so simple for Sahelian pastoralists living in uncertainty and absence of contingent markets. Sahelian pastoralists use livestock markets but these markets don't systematically influence their production and marketing decisions. Based on the case of Senegalese Sahel, we use a spatial panel model to estimate the magnitude impacts of spatial and time factors on pastoral income generation. Then, we extent discussions to show that Sahelian livestock keepers alternate homo oeconomicus and bounded behaviours vis-à-vis the markets that they know well even if markets don't know much about them-and that is one reason it can be hard for a real structural transition. The problems of pastoral marketing systems are still examined from the perspectives of infrastructure buildings while it is also necessary to reduce transaction costs and information asymmetry to boost livestock marketing.