The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a climate event associated with warming sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. In years of extreme El Niño events, areas in northern Peru experience catastrophic flooding.

Identity theft is a common crime the world over.

Over the past three years, payment strategies for emerging markets have been revolutionized by the advent of a simple cell-phone-based payment service in Kenya called M-PESA (“M” for “mobile” and “pesa” for “money”).

Community-based financial organizations (CBFOs) are user-owned and -operated groups that provide mainly saving and lending services but may also offer other financial services such as insurance.

Many people in the vast rural areas of Africa lack access to financial services, and most commercial banks are not interested in moving into these areas due to their low income levels, lack of scale economies, and poor infrastructure.

Agriculture is an inherently risky economic activity. A large array of uncontrollable elements can affect output production and prices, resulting in highly variable economic returns to farm households.

Poor people in developing countries are vulnerable to a broad range of shocks that affect their livelihoods, including illness, accidents, and death as well as loss of assets such as animals, crops, and machinery.

India has nearly 90 million farm households. More than 80 percent of these farmers operate on a small or marginal scale, farming less than two hectares of land. They also usually have one or two buffaloes or cows, reared for milk and dung.

The global financial crisis has intensified the problems of over-indebtedness, especially for the poor.

Credit for investments that pay back in the medium to long term (three to five years or longer) is in short supply in rural areas.

Since the establishment of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976, microfinance has boomed.

Before the late 1970s, rural dwellers in Ghana had almost no access to institutional credit for farm and nonfarm activities, and in many rural communities, secure, safe, and convenient savings and payment facilities hardly existed.

Livestock—poultry, small ruminants (such as goats and sheep), cattle, and pigs—provide many benefits for human well-being.

Si l’on veut atteindre les objectifs fondamentaux d’atténuation des changements climatiques et d’adaptation à ces changements, il faut y inclure l’agriculture. En effet, il existe des liens importants entre agriculture et changements climatiques.

La bioenergía --es decir, los biocombustibles de origen biológico y renovable, como el bioetanol, el biodiesel y la biomasa utilizada para generar energía-- es un tema que acapara cada vez más atención en todo el mundo.

Si se espera alcanzar las metas fundamentales de mitigación y adaptación del cambio climático, la agricultura debe ser parte integral de las negociaciones internacionales sobre clima.

Microinsurance is a powerful tool in helping low-income households transition out of poverty, but it has not achieved substantial scale compared with microcredit.

Uncertainty and risk are characteristics inherent in agricultural activities, and one of the main sources of risk is weather. Because agriculture depends heavily on rainfall, it is sensitive to weather changes.

Index-based insurance is an innovative financial product that has been introduced in recent years in countries as diverse as India, Malawi, Mongolia, and Thailand.