At Musoni we fundamentally believe in the ability of microfinance to have a positive social impact. It was great therefore to read the results of the recent World Bank study in Bangladesh, one of the most extensive ever completed (spanning 3,000 households across 20 years), which concluded that microfinance “increases personal expenditure, household assets, the labour supply and children’s education.”
What everyone agrees upon is the importance of increasing the amount of social performance measurement in the industry. One great way for organisations to do this is to use the ‘Progress out of Poverty Index’, which requires organisations to ask their clients ten simple questions, the answers to which correspond to a percentage likelihood of being below a national poverty line. MFIs can use this information to monitor the growth of their clients over time, or to analyse the average poverty level of clients using their services. You can download the different surveys for each country here.
Last week Grameen released their 2014 PPI Global Use Report, highlighting the 200 organisations around the world (including Musoni Kenya) actively using PPI surveys to monitor their social impact. This report aims to be an industry catalyst, encouraging more and more MFIs to adopt PPI as their social performance measurement tool as choice.
To make it as simple as possible for MFIs to adopt PPI, we have included it as standard in the Musoni System. Users can easily activate the PPI survey that corresponds to the country their organisation is operating in (see below where the PPI Uganda Survey has been activated):
User’s can also select the poverty line they wish the survey scores to be analyzed against. For each country survey, we provide the poverty line options recommended by Grameen:
Once the user has selected both the PPI Survey and the respective poverty line, you can easily carry out surveys for each client, going through the ten questions one by one:
At the end of the survey, the likelihood that the client is below the selected national poverty line is automatically calculated, and shown on reports throughout the system:
Easy as that!
In this way, we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for institutions using the Musoni System to adopt PPI as part of their operations. Hopefully in next year’s Grameen report we’ll see many more organisations in their list.
If you’d like a free demo of how easy it is to carry out social performance measurement with Musoni, just click on the link below: