Yves Cabannes

In: Cities Farming for the Future - Urban Agriculture for Green and Productive Cities

Financial support can make a significant difference to poor urban families. Many of the increasing group of urban dwellers who live around the poverty line are (informal) micro-entrepreneurs, involved in a diversity of activities such as waste collection and recycling, trading, having a shop, transport and farming. These entrepreneurs require access to working capital, but most of them face limited access to credit and investment schemes. Important lesson can be drawn from rural micro-finance programmes. The challenge now is to further build on these experiences, including (partnerships with) the private banking sector and rural innovative micro-finance institutions. This chapter reviews lessons learnt from studies in the urban setting.