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> Posted by Laura Galindo and Alexandra Rizzi, Senior Associate and Deputy Director, the Smart Campaign
A few days ago a post on this blog detailed debt collections practices in the United States. The Smart Campaign, led by Jami Solli of Consumers International, is working to shed light on provider practices in microfinance through exploratory research in Peru, India, and Uganda.
Once a client becomes seriously delinquent and moves into default, the possibilities for serious consequences for the client arise. Yet little is known about how microfinance institutions treat clients at these later stages. What alternatives do providers offer to clients who are in protracted arrears? How are clients treated when they are defaulting on multiple loans? What do clients experience during this difficult and stressful stage? And after the default, are client debt obligations resolved? Is there a concerted effort to rehabilitate or re-include defaulters?
In September, the Smart Campaign kicked off a research project to explore what happens to clients who default. The project focuses on how microfinance practitioners treat defaulting clients. It is scanning for best practices around the world – like debt mediation projects in Europe and middle-income countries – and examining practices in detail through interviews with practitioners and regulators in Peru, India, and Uganda. Interviews were also conducted with credit bureaus, debt collections agencies, consumer advocacy/protection groups, and researchers specialized in those markets. These countries were chosen, in part, because of their variation in credit bureau infrastructure and the hypothesis that this would have significant impact on provider practices.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
There’s no arguing that quality data is essential to achieving full financial inclusion. But of course if we want data to have an actual impact, it’s what we do with it that counts. The new Financial Services for the Poor (FSP) Interactive Map from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation incorporates financial inclusion data, country-specific supply-side data to be exact, into an interactive map with the aim of helping to identify gaps in access to financial services, to assist in designing policy, and to inform decision-making.
The tool uses GIS location data on financial access points – commercial banks, ATMs, microfinance institutions, mobile money agents, credit institutions, and post offices, among others – layered onto high resolution maps to create a visual representation of the financial services landscape for a given country. In addition to access points, the tool is able to display a country’s mobile coverage, urban areas, state lines, poorer areas, and population densities. The map is outfitted with a calculation tool that lets you generate numbers on financial services access, broken down in a number of ways including percentage of population covered, and urban or rural area. The countries currently available are Nigeria, Uganda, and Tanzania. Here’s a video of the tool in action.
The Power of Mapping Financial Services Data, a paper that describes the tool in greater detail and offers ideas on how it can be used to inform decision-making, was released last month. The paper lists the following points, broken down by stakeholder types, for how it might be used. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Center Staff
This edition of Top Picks features three posts that each highlight an initiative with the potential to further inform financial inclusion efforts. These initiatives include an entrepreneurial assistance program for women in post-war Uganda, a project that explored the effectiveness of microfinance providers offering health services, and an interactive workshop on impact evaluation.
- What’s the best way to help the poor in the aftermath of war? A new post on the Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) blog highlights the recent release of findings from a program that provided entrepreneurial assistance – business training, start-up money, ongoing support and monitoring – to women in northern Uganda. The assistance led to increases in business activity and decreases in poverty, but did not have an effect on non-economic areas, such as physical and mental health. The program was conducted by IPA, Italian NGO AVSI Uganda, and Chris Blattman of Columbia University.
- In his latest post on The Evidence Project, Chris Dunford shares the results of Freedom from Hunger’s Microfinance and Health Protection (MAHP) initiative, which sought to test the feasibility and impact of offering microfinance clients health education, as well as access to health services and products. Five large-scale microfinance providers participated in the initiative, developing health protection packages for their clients. The results from the initiative support a case for the effectiveness of integrating microfinance and health services.
- Re-Evaluating Impact Evaluation, a new Next Billion post from Hui Wen Chan of the Citi Foundation, revisits a recent impact evaluation workshop and shares some of the key discussion points from the event. Arguably the most salient of these being think beyond the financial, consider both the economic and non-economic impacts of your products or services. Another key point shared in the post is the integrity of data depends both on the questions asked and the manner in which they are asked. The workshop was provided by the William Davidson Institute (WDI) and hosted by the Citi Foundation in New York City.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
It’s well acknowledged that in designing financial products, service providers should connect with prospective clients and their needs. Though the extent to which this actually happens remains a cause for concern. That’s a big part of why AgriLife, a new mobile-based financial services platform for smallholder farmers, intrigues me.
AgriLife is open-ended, built as a platform with integration points through which providers can “plug in” and deliver their services. These include financial services providers, mobile network operators, and a variety of agricultural players. On the client side, the farmers use the services available through AgriLife – like crop insurance, input payments, and savings accounts – and in turn provide information through the platform on their own farming activities. Farmers can provide information on their crops – what they’re producing, how much, and what they’re yielding. This user data is collected and analyzed by the providers and used to better shape their offered services. Over time, the user information amasses to establish a farmer’s production capabilities. These production capabilities can be used by farmers to access credit through AgriLife’s associated services. Additionally, the resulting electronic transaction records for many of these farmers helps them build a credit history that can be used, via AgriLife services or otherwise, for financing throughout the value chain.
AgriLife recently launched in Uganda. One of its early adopters is the Farmers Centre, a farmer-centric agribusiness in Northern Uganda, and its thousands of affiliated farmers. These individuals often travel long distances to the Centre’s warehouses to purchase inputs and aggregate their produce for processing and selling. Previously, these transactions had been done on paper with data stored on a single computer. AgriLife makes it possible for these processes to be done much quicker and, as it’s cloud-based, more securely. With more robust records on their farmers, the Centre is able to make informed recommendations on what farmers should plant and which inputs they should obtain, and make informed linkages between farmers and buyers.
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
In this decade, Africa is undergoing urbanization at a faster rate than Latin America, Asia, or anywhere else in the world. In these burgeoning areas, the majority of people are building their own housing, and doing so in an incremental fashion – adding what they can, when they can, and developing their facilities as their means allow.
There are a few big challenges to this. In Africa’s urban centers, there is a limited supply of affordable housing, and financial services to aid housing development are also scarce. Global Findex Data indicate that access to and usage of credit in sub-Saharan Africa is among the lowest in the world. Specifically looking at mortgages, a recent study from FinMark Trust revealed that across the populations of Zambia, Malawi, Botswana, and Tanzania, less than 1.5 percent of individuals utilize mortgages.
Enter microfinance. Typical mortgages don’t fit well with the financial profile of most Africans. Compared to microloans, they’re generally for longer terms, larger amounts, and they are less flexible. Most mortgages require clients to provide documentation of regular incomes. Many Africans operate in the informal sector and lack regular income streams. In Tanzania, for example, only 28 percent of the population is able to satisfy this income requirement.
> Posted by Center Staff
With so much activity in the financial inclusion sphere these days, Top Picks had plenty of great blogs to consider sharing this week. Three posts stood out to us though, covering the areas of adolescent empowerment, new biometric identification technology research, and electronic government-to-person (G2P) payments.
- Adolescent women in Uganda are improving their economic situation and are living healthier lives, thanks to BRAC Uganda’s Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents ELA Program. A new post on the Kiva blog shares the results from an independent impact study revealing that the ELA program is attaining significant success. The program results in a 35 percent increase in likelihood that an adolescent girl would be engaged in an income-generating activity, a 13 percent increase in condom use among sexually active participants, and an 83 percent decrease in participants’ reports of having sex unwillingly. Over 40,000 women have been reached by the program. Kiva offers loans to program participants. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
Buzz about the promise of mobile money services has been around for some time now (see our previous blog posts on the subject here, here, and here), but until coming across a recently released report from mWomen, I’d never found anything highlighting the especially big opportunity that mobile money presents for lower-income women.
mWomen’s report Striving and Surviving: Exploring the Lives of Women at the Base of the Pyramid examines the relationship between mobile phones and women, and in doing so articulates how exceedingly well-positioned this client segment is to benefit from mobile money services. mWomen is a program of GSMA that brings together the worldwide mobile industry and the global development community to reduce the mobile phone gender gap by 50 percent by 2014, facilitating connectivity to more than 150 million women in emerging markets.
> Posted by Mary Jo Kochendorfer, Manager, Social Performance Management Center, Grameen Foundation
Mary Jo Kochendorfer, on right, at AFMIN Annual Conference in Uganda.
This post by Mary Jo Kochendorfer was originally published on the Progress out of Poverty blog. Progress out of Poverty is an initiative of the Grameen Foundation that assists microfinance institutions and other organizations measure and track the poverty levels of groups and individuals, and in turn better manage their programs.
This past summer, the microfinance industry recently celebrated a milestone when the Social Performance Task Force (SPTF) released the Universal Standards of Social Performance Management (USSPM) after a worldwide consensus-building effort. After much work and collaboration, the microfinance industry, by way of the SPTF, came together and put forth standards which outline the best practices for monitoring and managing social performance. The SPTF defines social performance as “the effective translation of an institution’s social mission into practice in line with accepted social values.” Following the SPTF annual meeting back in June, regional microfinance networks have also prioritized social performance in their agendas.
Last month, the Africa Microfinance Network (AFMIN) hosted its annual conference in Kampala, Uganda to discuss “the State-of-the-Practice of Social Performance Management in Africa.” While there, I participated in a panel on Poverty Measurement Tools along with colleagues from Caurie-Microfinance, VisionFund International and CGAP.
> Posted by Shannon Mudd, Coordinator, Microfinance and Impact Investing Initiative, Haverford College
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.
What factors determine where microfinance institutions (MFI’s) locate their branches – and where they do not? A group of students at Haverford College set out to explore this question, initially focusing their efforts on Uganda.
The project grew out of a conversation with Susy Cheston of CFI about who is excluded from financial services and whether maps might help us understand more about who these excluded are and the challenges in reaching them. As coordinator of Haverford’s new Microfinance and Impact Investing Initiative (MI3) I was seeking ways to engage students in research that bridged theory and practice. Recalling that our new Librarian had previously been involved in a mapping project, I returned to Haverford to see what resources we might bring to bear. I discovered that we had the right software, a skilled and supportive library and, best of all, some terrific students in the Microfinance Consulting Club who were willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work (properly fueled by pizza, carrots and seltzer water).
Why Uganda? Not surprisingly, such an effort is largely driven by data availability. We became aware of a directory of MFI branches in Uganda published by the Association of Microfinance Institutions of Uganda (special thanks to Scott Gaul of TheMIX.org!). The directory provided us with district level locations across Uganda’s 100 districts). Additional research helped us to further refine locations for a majority of the branches. We then looked for sub-national socio-economic data that we could turn into map layers to conduct our analysis. The product of our initial efforts has been posted here.
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