A/HRC/22/50 in the early 1990s is one example. 49 But, overall evidence is mixed. Because the creditworthiness of women (as measured by loan repayment rates) is higher than that of men, women in practice may be used as convenient "middlemen" by the lending institutions‟ field workers and by the male members of households. This runs the risk of creating increased tensions within the household when the husband or other male relative does not give the woman the money to allow her to repay the loan on time or when the woman cannot access the loans she has obtained.50 Women benefiting from microcredit in rural Bangladesh, for instance through the Grameen Bank, only seldom use the loans to run their own businesses, Instead of becoming entrepreneurs themselves, they often use the loans to support the capital of existing businesses that are usually managed by male members in the household or to support their husbands in launching micro-enterprises.51 Similar results were found in Andra Pradesh, India.52 35. Second, there is an inherent tension between the hope that microfinance programmes can function as a financially self-sustaining means of addressing rural poverty, and the objective of supporting the poorest women and single women with a low capacity to improve their productivity levels – because they may be poorly qualified or illiterate, or cannot move beyond home-based activities due to their household responsibilities. The result is that while microfinance programmes increasingly target rural women, they mainly benefit the women who already have most assets or who have male relatives to work with them, and often do not reach the poorest, who operate in a "mini-economy" of very small transactions, so small in fact that the transaction costs of dealing with them are too high even for microcredit institutions.53 36. Finally, in order to make a stronger contribution to poverty alleviation and to women's empowerment, agricultural research and development could take into account the specific constraints faced by women and their preferences. For instance, women may prefer crop varieties that can be more easily prepared for the family or that are easier to cultivate, for instance, those that are less threatened by weeds or can be easily husked. Because of the obstacles women face in accessing credit, they may prefer to grow crops following agro-ecological, low-external-input techniques, which also avoid the need to transport bags of fertilizers, which could be difficult in the absence of adequate means of transportation.54 Rural women possess traditional farming knowledge and skills that, in many cases, represent a huge, largely untapped potential. 49 50 51 52 53 54 16 R.D.M. Panjaitan-Drioadisuryo and K. Cloud, "Gender, Self-Employment, and Microcredit Programs: An Indonesian Case Study", The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, vol. 39, No. 5 (1999), pp. 769-79. A.M. Goetz and R. Sen Gupta, "Who Takes Credit? Gender, Power, and Control Over Loan Use in Rural Credit Programs in Bangladesh", World Development, vol. 24, No. 1 (1996), pp. 45- 63; A. Rahman, "Micro-credit initiatives for equitable and sustainable development: who pays?", World Development, vol. 27, No. 1 (1999), pp. 67–82; Sujata Balasubramanian, 'Why Micro-Credit May Leave Women Worse Off: Non-Cooperative Bargaining and the Marriage Game in South Asia", Journal of Development Studies (2012), pp. 1-15 (DOI:10.1080/00220388.2012.709618). M.J.A. Chowdhury, “Microcredit, micro-enterprises, and self-employment of women: experience from the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh”, FAO-IFAD-ILO Workshop on Gaps, trends and current research in gender dimensions of agricultural and rural employment, Rome, 31 March-2 April 2009. S. Garikipati, "Microcredit and women‟s empowerment: understanding the „impact paradox‟ with particular reference to South India", in S. Chant, ed., The International Handbook of Gender and Poverty: Concepts, Research, Policy (Cheltenham, Northampton, Edward Elgar, 2010), pp. 599–605. R. Sabates-Wheeler and N. Kabeer, “Gender equality and the extension of social protection”, ESS Paper No. 16 (Geneva, ILO, 2003), p. 40. R. Meinzen-Dick et al., Engendering Agricultural Research, Development and Extension (Washington, D.C., IFPRI, 2011).