This is a really important question, and I agree a bit of a puzzle. Burke, Bergquist, and Miguel sort of address it in "Sell Low and Buy High". Burke et al. test the effect of providing credit to farmers in Kenya. They find that with access to credit, farmers are able to save more of their harvest and sell it at a different time when local prices are higher, raising their income and allowing them to pay back the loan. The return on investment is 29%.
But, as you say, 29% is a big return - why aren't local lenders already providing this opportunity? From the very end of the paper (p. 838-9):
What our results do not address is why wealthy local actors—for example, large-scale private traders—have not stepped in to bid away these arbitrage opportunities. Traders do exist in the area and can commonly be found in local markets. In a panel survey of local traders, we record data on the timing of their marketing activities and storage behavior but find little evidence of long-run storage. When asked to explain this limited storage, many traders report being able to make even higher total profits by engaging in spatial arbitrage across markets (relative to temporal arbitrage). Nevertheless, this does not explain why the scale or number of traders engaging in both spatial and intertemporal arbitrage has not expanded; imperfect competition among traders may play a role
So, yeah, they don't really know. Lenders have other good opportunities, and maybe discount future returns enough that they would rather engage in spatial rather than temporal arbitrage. As Larks wrote, too, risk aversion and fixed costs could make these very small loans to people in extreme poverty unattractive.
This is a good question. In the absence of other explanations of market failure, this is an update away from the view that direct anti-poverty interventions do have high ROI. While some RCTs of anti-poverty programmes like the Graduation approach might show a big ROI, perhaps the market actors know not to trust these RCTs. Maybe they have an implicit view on the external validity of these studies, which has been demonstrated to be low
Right! Except for anti-poverty interventions targeting public goods, which would be underfunded not because of a market inefficiency, but a political one, most likely AFAICT. And there are also possible other explanations than market failures, such as a high fix cost for loans maybe. But it's still evidence, in either case, that anti-poverty interventions don't have that high a ROI.