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Monitoring the Diversity of the Poverty Outreach and Impact of Microfinance: A Comparison of Methods Using Data from Peru
Author(s) -
Copestake J.,
Dawson P.,
Fanning J.P.,
McKay A.,
WrightRevolledo K.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
development policy review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.671
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1467-7679
pISSN - 0950-6764
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7679.2005.00309.x
Subject(s) - microfinance , outreach , proxy (statistics) , poverty , diversity (politics) , business , survey data collection , economic growth , socioeconomics , geography , political science , economics , computer science , statistics , mathematics , machine learning , law
Many microfinance institutions claim to be oriented to a double bottom line, but while methods of financial performance assessment are widely agreed the same cannot be said about social performance. Monitoring social performance is most useful when it reveals variation in both outreach and impact over time and between clients. Data from a village banking programme in Peru is used to compare two methods for assessing each. On poverty outreach, we favour monitoring of proxy indicators for clients against national household survey data, and on impact we recommend making more use of individual in‐depth interviews.