The major sources of informal lending are friends, relatives and kin members, landlords, neighbors, shopkeepers, marketing intermediaries, money lenders and other local income groups.
Evolutionary biology has solid explanations about in-group and out-group loyalty, about the ways in which the destinies of kin members serve the group and not just the individual, about why mating across barriers can rebound for individual fitness.
Indirect fitness benefits require high relatedness within the population, ensuring cooperative behaviours benefit local kin members.
It follows that couples who can rely on close kin members for support are more likely to raise more or better-quality children than couples who are not surrounded by close kin (Kramer 2010; Salmon and Shackelford 2008).
Of all the network types this cluster was the most family-focused: older people with these networks were least likely to participate in social groups or community meetings, and networks were comprised overwhelmingly of kin members with only around one-tenth of non-kin network members.
It follows that if couples can rely on close kin members for support, they are more likely to raise more and/or better-quality children than couples who are not helped by kin (Kaptijn et al. 2010; Kramer 2010; Salmon and Shackelford 2008; Schaffnit and Sear 2014).
The findings presented here raise further questions concerning the role and position of kin members within the household as well as the extent of their cooperative behavior, such as provisioning of care or contributions to household income, which is difficult to infer from kin presence alone (see, e.g., Schaffnit and Sear 2014).
Our point of departure was the broad hypothesis that, on the basis of inclusive fitness theory, all close kin members would exert a positive influence on reproductive outcomes by enabling the women in our sample to have shorter intervals between births.
In the case of adults, the guardian would likely be the male head of the family or the next of kin male family member.
