Financing the development of poor communities in the Northern Cape of South Africa - an analytical framework for the study of livestock banks

This paper is part of a major project about the Northern Cape Land Reform and Advocacy (NCLRA) programme being implemented by FARM-Africa* in South Africa. The NCLRA programme had initiated a financial mechanism to help poor communities to get access to finance and training in order to enable them to make better use of their newly-acquired land. One prominent aspect of the programme is the implementation of Livestock Banks, or the use of animals as financial products. The paper provides an analytical framework with which to evaluate the effectiveness of Livestock Banks in the poor communities of the Northern Cape in South Africa. It focuses on the design, implementation and future of Livestock Banks. The paper argues that Livestock Banks need to be reformed and enhanced if they are to continue to play a key role in the goal of creating financial and economic value in Africa, particularly when the primary objective is simultaneously to help reduce poverty. [Note]*FARM-Africa (Food & Agricultural Research Management) is a registered UK charity organisation and a company limited by guarantee in England and Wales no. 01926828.

From the transformation to the bancarization of the spanishsaving banks: an analysis of the results pursued

This research arises due to the current restructuring process in which is immersed the Spanish banking sector. The above mentioned process is carried out to try to reduce the doubts on the viability of the bank companies to average and long term and to be able to return again the confidence in the sector. Though the economic and financial crisis has concerned the whole banking sector, the subsector of the Spanish savings banks is the one that has experienced a major number of integrations (articulated by means of mergers, absorptions and across Institutional Protection Schemes -IPSs-), and the one that has met submitted to the bancarization process. Considering what has been said, the present paper analyses Spanish saving banks to try to discern whether thanks to that process the objectives pursued by the bank rearrangement have been fulfilled. To do this, the evolution of some important financial variables will be studied over a long period of time (1999-2012). The results suggest that not all the savings banks have seen improved their ratios of efficiency, solvency, financial gap and social work, which indicates that there is still much to be done in order to rectify the problems affecting the studied sector.