This review analyzes experience with the Community Empowerment Project (CEP) credit component, and draws a number of lessons and general principles. Credit contributed to a revival of rural economic activities, especially petty trading and the supply of manufactured goods, helping to re-establish markets and stimulating production and marketing of foodstuffs and higher-value crops. The CEP experience also offers no new lessons on microcredit, but reinforces those from experience elsewhere, and underlines some limitations of microcredit in the immediate post conflict crisis setting.