A Riverbank Filtration Demonstration Project on the Banks of the Kali River in southwestern India (Poster)
This project investigates a small Riverbank Filtration (RBF) system in the tropical monsoon climate of rural western India. As in much of India, the residents of the village of Kariyampalli do not have reliable access to safe drinking water and face problems with contaminated surface water and with the potential for groundwater depletion. RBF addresses both issues of polluted surface water supplies (Schmidt et al, 2003; Boving et al, 2010) and the overuse of groundwater, a worldwide problem with recent data showing severe examples in northern India (Rodell et al, 2009).
Understanding how capital flows within rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa can provide important insights on the nature of poverty and the effectiveness of financial intermediation interventions. In this paper, we use unique individual level savings and borrowing data to study the flow of funds within a sample of 104 Ugandan savings groups. We show that poor households borrow from wealthier households, which implies that the marginal benefit of money is decreasing in wealth. The result suggests that savings groups are effective at channeling funds to their poorest members.