Description of the MRD Survey Data

5.1.1 Questionnaire Design

The household survey was conducted in 2010 using a structured questionnaire interview. The questionnaire was designed to gather information on the respondents‟ access to microcredit in the Mekong River Delta, given the availability of microcredit programmes. The survey questionnaire aimed to collect information about the demographic characteristics, income, expenditure (on farm and non-farm activities, education, health care) and information about accessibility to credit (formal microcredit and informal credit) of rural households. In addition, if they had participated in a microcredit programme, respondents were asked about the impact of microcredit on their families and welfare.

The questionnaire consists of six sections. The first section was designed to identify the demand for credit and the access to formal and informal credit for all respondents. Information about the different microcredit programmes and the future demand for credit were included in this section. Section 2 focussed on the loan (both formal and informal) characteristics of the borrowing households; specific characteristics such as loan amount, loan duration, interest rate, mode of repayment, and purpose of loan were asked. Sections 3, 4 and 5 were designed to obtain information from the respondents about participation in a

microcredit programme and to understand how microcredit affected the respondents‟ living conditions. Only respondents who had obtained a loan in 2009 were asked to answer these sections. Section 6 concludes the questionnaire with demographic information of the respondents in the sample (see Appendix C).

104

The questionnaire was pre-tested with a small sample of six borrowing and four non- borrowing households in Can Tho city to check for completeness and consistency. This pre- testing helped to clarify and improve the quality of the questions used in the questionnaire before administering the survey.

5.1.2 Data Collection

A three-stage stratified random sampling technique was used to draw the survey sample. In the first stage, sample communes were selected on the basis of the availability of formal

microcredit providers. Fourteen rural districts19 were selected. To capture the micro lending

practices, the selected districts must have had microcredit programmes operating since 2002. All rural districts in the sample complied with the condition that a branch of the microcredit provider existed in the district. To control for heterogeneity at the commune level, 3 of the14 communes were selected from ethnic populated districts. Next, communes were selected from the sample districts to form the sample communes. Two villages were randomly chosen from each sample commune; altogether 22 villages were included. The selection of the sample households was the final stage of the sampling process.

To capture credit accessibility in the rural credit market, the selected respondents addressed the household credit constraint that requires the sampled respondents to have at least

demanded any type of loan during the previous 12 months. In addition, the objective of this study is to assess the impact of the microcredit programme on rural households, it is necessary to obtain a sample containing a sufficient number of rural households borrowing from the microcredit programme and a similar number of rural households that had a demand for credit but were unable to obtain a microloan. The specified sample is expected to be appropriate for the household model of credit accessibility and for the impact assessment framework using the propensity score matching approach discussed in Chapter 4.

Unless informal loan associated with borrower is stated, respondents were classified into two groups based on their formal borrowing status. The group of rural households that had borrowed from microcredit programmes is referred to as the borrowing group and the other group of rural households that had a demand for credit but had never borrowed a formal loan

19

The administrative divisions in the MRD are classified as provincial, district, commune, and village. Communes or their urban equivalent, the district towns or wards, are defined as the primary unit of sample design in the VHLSS.

105

is referred to as the non-borrowing group. Given the households‟ characteristics, the survey questionnaire was designed to capture the credit constraints of rural households with respect to formal microcredit in the previous 12 months. Households that had not borrowed a formal loan were asked to provide information about any informal loan if they had borrowed an informal loan. The informal loan is used to investigate the interacting effect between the formal and informal credit markets.

The sampled households were selected as follows. First, the households with access to microcredit, namely the borrower group, were identified through the local authority at each research site. A total of 619 borrowers were randomly chosen to participate in an interview. Then, 309 non-borrowing households that had not been able to obtain a formal loan within the last 12 months were randomly selected. Overall, 928 households were included in the sample; all respondents were the head of the household since we considered the household head as the representative for household‟s decision making and because microcredit are issued to the household under the name of the household head. This selection ensures a consistent covariate of the household characteristics to be obtained from the survey.