Determinants of access to microfinance: a case study of savings and credit cooperatives of Côte d’Ivoire

Resumen

Despite the significant development of microfinance in Côte d’Ivoire, a substantial proportion of the population continues to use informal market loans for their financial transactions. Beyond structural constraints commonly put forward in the literature, the factors involved in limiting access to credit and microcredit in particular are many and varied in different contexts. From a survey on household living standards (ENV 2008), this paper attempts to understand the determinants of access to savings and credit cooperatives and other sources of funding which households use for their financial transactions.

It appears that the household profiles are quite clearly distinct by the use of different funding sources. Savings and credit cooperatives seem to be inaccessible to workers in the agricultural and non-agricultural informal sector or they rely less on this source for their financial transactions. There also exists a substitution relationship between different funding sources because access to one source significantly reduces the probability of access to another.