One type of financial institution that has been increasingly used as credit conduit of these special credit programmes is the credit union system. Credit unions mobilize savings from and lend funds to their members. However, their resources may not be sufficient to satisfy the growing credit demands f their members. Credit unions confronted with this problem try to solve it by asking their members to line up for credit and by rationing credit. This could involve opportunity costs to those who wanted to have a certain amount of credit at a particular time. Access to additional external sources of funds could relax this resource constraint.