The SEEP Network Blog

Applying Economic Recovery in Regional Contexts – The Minimum Economic Recovery Standards Trainings in Beirut

Nakul Kadaba — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:15:11 +0000

The Minimum Economic Recovery Standards, Second Edition (MERS) hosted a training session in Beirut, Lebanon from June 3-6, 2013. Thirteen participants came from various NGOs and different parts of the country, filled with expectations of how this would help them as humanitarian practitioners and livelihoods programmers. Building on the progress made from the first MERS training sessions in Bangkok, the training consisted of a 2-day General Practitioner Training, followed by a 2-day Training of Certified Trainers for those who wished to become trainers of the MERS to deliver the standards to their colleagues and beneficiaries.

Participants saw this as an ideal opportunity to relate their work to the standards, which present an organized and comprehensive set of key actions, indicators, and guidance notes for practitioners to abide by when promoting economic recovery in areas recently affected by crisis. While opinions were divided on whether to include government agents in economic recovery operations, all participants agreed that there should always be time to assess the market and include the beneficiaries in the process of economic recovery.

Figure 1: MERS Training Participants working to put together presentations to describe specific aspects of the standards to their colleagues

Group work was lauded as extremely beneficial for learning the standards, as different groups were assigned various sections of the MERS to explain to their peers for further understanding. Formal presentation was followed by questions surrounding the applicability of the MERS and how participants could use the specific technical elements of the standards in their work. A unique aspect of this training was the ability of the participants to show how the standards could directly apply to their work. Examples of how the MERS were needed in Lebanon were exemplified through participant accounts of working in Palestinian and Syrian refugee camps, linking disadvantaged communities in southern Lebanon with supply chains on production of basic agricultural products like olive oil and honey, and creating better opportunities in Akkar for children looking to move past the destruction happening just on the Syrian side of the border.

Figure 2: The Training of Certified Trainers participants look into varying styles of learning and behavior to better themselves as future trainers of the MERS.

The Training of Certified Trainers gave participants an opportunity to learn more about the standards and gain access to the training materials so that they could deliver the training sessions to their colleagues and beneficiaries. Sessions dealt more on presentation style, learning to accommodate different learning styles, and coping with various behavioral patterns from participants. Their final presentations concentrated on presenting a part of the handbook to their peers, followed by a critiquing session on their delivery, presentation skills, and ability to comprehensively describe the MERS to practitioners. To accommodate for our new class of Arabic-speaking trainers, we translated the MERS handbook into Arabic, along with English, Spanish, and French!

Figure 3: MERS Training of Certified Trainers participants, trainer Tony Dines, and SEEP facilitator Nakul Kadaba pose after receiving their certificates for completing the Training of Certified Trainers course.

As we grow our pool of certified trainers, we are eagerly awaiting more news of interest in hosting training sessions and presenting case studies of the MERS in Action. Thank you to our training participants, our local partner World Vision-Lebanon, and the Tamar-Rotana Hadeth Hotel staff for their support in hosting the training sessions. We would also like to give a special thank you to our trainer, Tony Dines, for a terrific job delivering the training in Beirut! To find out more information about upcoming MERS training sessions and other related information, please visit our website on the MERS here or contact William Wallis!

Tapping the Reservoir: Assessing the Impact of Financial Services for Youth in Morocco

The SEEP Network — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:16:20 +0000

Tapping the Reservoir Assessing the Impact of Financial Services for Youth in Morocco from SEEP Network on Vimeo.

On June 12^th , 2013, SEEP hosted a discussion on the financial education and loan program impacts from MEDA’s YouthInvest (YI) project in Morocco and Egypt.

Today’s youth are remarkable reservoirs of energy, knowledge and potential. However, poverty and a lack of access to services severely limit the ability to harness this energy. The lack of economic opportunity contributes to the stagnation and endless cycle of hardship within families. Providing financial services to youth creates an untapped opportunity to develop markets, bring people in from the margins and give them the tools with which to help themselves.

Currently there are more than 100 million youth between the ages of 15 and 29 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, approximately one third of the region’s total population. In Morocco, young people constitute 30% of Morocco’s population and one tenth of the region’s total youth population. [1]

With the support of the MasterCard Foundation, MEDA’s 5 year YouthInvest project has worked with national NGOs and MFIs to harness this untapped segment to provide access to youth appropriate financial products and non-financial services.

In 2011, MEDA launched a study to assess the initial impacts of the loan program by interviewing youth loan recipients, training participants, and a control group of non-participants as well as MFI staff. The study focused on the impact of loans designed for youth clients in Morocco as well as mandatory financial education training youth required before accessing these loans.

Speakers included:

Adil Sadoq (YouthInvest Field Project Manager)
Nicki Post (MEDA Sr. Project Manager)
Khadija Saoudi (YouthInvest Deputy Director)

Read more in Assessing the Impact of Product Features and Financial Education in Morocco

[1] World Bank, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/05/14/challenge-of-youth-inclusion-in-morocco

Global Movement into the Vulnerable Class, and What it Means for Financial Inclusion

Center for Financial Inclusion — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:10:32 +0000

This post originally appeared on June 11, 2013 here: http://cfi-blog.org/2013/06/11/global-movement-into-the-vulnerable-class-and-what-it-means-for-financial-inclusion/
Reposted with Permission

By Sonja E. Kelly and Elisabeth Rhyne, Fellow and Managing Director, CFI

The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. Accordingly, this blog series will spotlight financial inclusion efforts around the globe, share insights coming out of the creation of a roadmap to full financial inclusion, and highlight findings from research on the “invisible market.”

This post is based on research from the Mapping the Invisible Market project published in the paper Growing Income, Growing Inclusion by Sonja E. Kelly and Elisabeth Rhyne. The paper was released today, and can be downloaded at mapping.financialinclusion2020.org/growing-income-growing-inclusion.

The World Bank, UN, and The Economist are all talking about it: growing income around the world. The UN’s goal to halve the number of people living in poverty by 2015 has already been achieved, and the media frequently spotlights growth in emerging markets contrasted with reports of malaise in the EU and US economies. In low and middle-income economies, it isn’t just the wealthy or the well-connected who benefit from this growth. Real incomes are rising among the poor, moving hundreds of millions of people from extreme levels of poverty into levels at which they begin to have more income flexibility.

Over the course of this decade, the bottom two quintiles in many of the world’s most populous countries will see movement into and even beyond the “vulnerable class,” defined as having an income of $4 to $10 per day.

In 2010, the bottom 40 percent of the populations, in low and middle-income economies constituted a market of $3 trillion. By the end of the decade, the real spending power of this market will nearly double, to $5.8 trillion.

Last year, the World Bank’s Global Findex reported that the number one reason that people did not have a bank account was that they did not have enough money. We also see a moderately strong statistical connection between income and account use in the bottom 40 percent.

With higher personal income, financial management will likely shift to more formal services as people gradually “outgrow” their informal mechanisms. The time it takes a person to make this shift depends on a number of factors, including the level, source, and volatility of an individual’s income as well as the availability of suitable services.

Understanding this transition is essential as policymakers and providers seek to prepare for it. If providers can offer appropriately tooled products, higher incomes at the base of the pyramid will translate into greater financial inclusion. If policymakers can encourage growth while safeguarding it, they will be able to anticipate challenges to client protection for customers using formal financial services for the first time.

Offering appropriately tooled products and anticipating client protection challenges, of course, are not limited to places that will see high growth over this decade. Much of Africa’s bottom 40 percent, for example, will continue to be under the $4 to $10 per day range, and in these places, creative application of technology and mission-driven organizations will play a key role in increasing financial inclusion.

For more on the connection between income and inclusion, head on over to the Mapping the Invisible Market website at mapping.financialinclusion2020.org.

For more information on Financial Inclusion 2020, and to explore becoming roadmap contributors or reviewers, sign up for campaign updates.

Figures’ source: Authors’ calculations based on World Economic Outlook and UNU-Wider database on inequality

Redesigning Aid for Complex Systems

Marcus Jenal — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:26:57 +0000

This blog post by Marcus Jenal first appeared here: http://marcusjenal.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/redesigning-aid-for-complex-systems/ on June 9, 2013.
Reposted with permission

Before venturing into an outline of a results measurement framework I want to point out two blog posts by Duncan Green on aid in complex systems that are very well written and to the point.

The first one asks the question of “how to plan when you don’t know what is going to happen?” Starting point is the obvious dichotomy that is also driving our discussion about measuring results:

The crucial point is that most political, social and economic systems [are complex]. Yet the aid business insists on pursuing a linear model of change, either explicitly, or implicitly because a ‘good’ funding application has a clear set of activities, outputs, outcomes and a MEL [Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning] system that can attribute any change to the project’s activities – a highly linear approach.

Duncan then proposes a few bullet points that are crucial when planning in situations of uncertainty. The list gives in my view a brief but very comprehensive idea of how planning in development projects should look like with important consequences also for monitoring and evaluation. Besides the two aspects that I have mentioned before in my writing, i.e. fast feedbacks and an evolutionary approach, there is one aspect I want to highlight that appears in various forms in Duncan’s list:

Focus on problems, not solutions: The role of outsiders is to identify and amplify problems, but leave the search for solutions to local institutions.

This point was for me once again very obvious when I recently reviewed a project document (or ‘business plan’ as it is nowadays called for economic development programs). The document featured a very thorough analysis of a number of economic sectors. Based on that, it proposed a number of solutions to the identified constraints, mainly the introduction of new business models to overcome exclusion of marginal farmers from markets. The focus was on the one hand an improved input and knowledge transfer system, and on the other hand better linkages between the farmers and buyers. These solutions were planned in a very detailed fashion and implementation spelled out to the last activity, starting with identifying private sector partners (lead firms) to champion the approaches.

So in effect, this is sort of the contrary to what planning in complex systems is proposing. The role of a project would rather be to amplify the problem (of the marginalization of small farmers from a market perspective – and the potential opportunities that are lost through that). Then the project should convene relevant stakeholders and set the stage for them to search for solutions that make sense in the local context. This is supported by another point in Duncan’s list:

Convening and Brokering: Get dissimilar local players together to find solutions – the outsiders’ job is to support that search.

Another perspective on this is to acknowledge that there are no ‘best practices’ to solve problems in complex systems. We should rather search for rules of thumb that we can apply in different contexts:

Rules of thumb, not best practice toolkits: I am told that the US marines do not go into combat brandishing Oxfam toolkits and online resources on best practice. They operate on rules of thumb – take the high ground, stay in communications and keep moving. They improvise the rest. Aid workers on the ground operate far more like this than our project reports admit. If we were honest about it, we could have a better discussion on how to improve those rules of thumb.

This is also reflected in my earlier writing on intuition and heuristics.

Finally, Duncan also touches on the results discussion:

The current approach to measuring results favours linearity. But rejecting results altogether is the wrong approach – both because even those who recognize the central role of complex systems still want to know if they’re doing any good, and because the results people control the cash. No results, no funding. We need to get much better at ‘counting what counts’, and reclaim the idea of ‘rigour’ for qualitative and other methods better suited to complex systems.

In the second post, Duncan writes about a meeting he was attending where Matt Andrews presented his approach called Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA). The approach is mainly focusing on institutional reform. Again, the discussion touches on results:

There was a good discussion on what constitutes ‘results’. Good PDIA-type work in developing countries requires a rapid feedback loop of results, but of a different kind to those typically demanded by the aid business. Developing country politicians want to know what’s happening with their money, what has been learned, what has worked and what hasn’t, and how the project has responded. They don’t need the (often bogus) certainty and data demanded by aid planners.

This week, I am in Kenya looking at the Monitoring and Evaluation framework of a big market development program here. I hope to learn more on the practical application of some of the principles for systemic M&E, which will also feed into the promised post sketching out an MRM framework.

Economic Strengthening Programs as Drivers of Child Well-being

alison.yost — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 13:15:47 +0000

CYES Webinar: Economic Strengthening Programs as Drivers of Child Well-being from SEEP Network on Vimeo.

Economic strengthening programs have an impact on children and youth, whether intentionally or unintentionally. How do we understand the factors that impact child well-being? How do we research and measure these? This seminar explored examples of field-based practice, including discussions on key initiatives taking place within PEPFAR and USG, and discussed what we still need to explore as development practitioners.

Agenda

Facilitator: Margie Brand

Framing the Context

John Williamson, Displaced Children and Orphans Fund, USAID

USG Action Plan on Children in Adversity Economic Strengthening Plus

Richard Rinehart, Senior Technical Advisor for Monitoring, Evaluation, and Evidence-based Practices for Assistance to Vulnerable Children, USAID

New Generation Project, Burundi

Juliette Seban, IRC

STRIVE Mozambique: Methods and Results-

Ntongi McFadyen, Save the Children

STRIVE Philippines: Child Use of Time Measurement Tool

Diana Rutherford, FHI360

PEPFAR OVS Program Evaluation Toolkit

Jenifer Chapman, Senior M&E Advisor for Orphans and Vulnerable Children, Futures Group

VSLAs: Addressing the Evidence Gap on Child-level Outcomes

Lindsey Parr — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:13:12 +0000

Evidence of the important role of savings in strengthening the economic status of poor households continues to grow, but there is a large knowledge gap on how Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs)—a common intervention to promote savings—affect the well-being of children. Two current research projects—the STRIVE Mozambique project implemented by Save the Children and managed by FHI 360, and the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) New Generation project in Burundi—aim to shed further light on this important topic.

Both STRIVE Mozambique and New Generation implemented and tested VSLA interventions and “VSLA Plus” (VSLA as well as complementary interventions). The research projects compared results at the household and child levels among groups participating in different interventions as well as comparison groups.

STRIVE Mozambique, funded by the USAID Displaced Children and Orphans Fund (DCOF), sought to improve nutritional outcomes for children under the age of five by expanding the amount and quality of food they eat. Save the Children facilitated savings and income earning opportunities in communities by mobilizing village savings and loan groups (VSL) and promoting a rotating shared labor scheme called Ajuda Mutua (AM) that increased the amount of labor available to participating households. The project reached over 10,000 participants in 583 groups and had three distinct treatment arms in separate districts: VSL only, AM only, and VSL and AM in combination. All three treatments were offered in communities benefiting from a Food Security through Nutrition and Agriculture (SANA) Multi-Year Assistance Program (MYAP). Save the Children measured household and child-level impacts through a quasi-experimental evaluation. The main research question was whether caregiver participation in the program affected children’s nutrition. To that end, program effects on income, assets, social capital, food security and diversity (at both household and child levels), and child anthropometry were measured.

Quantitative results show substantial positive effects from all program arms on key household-level indicators including months of food security and income and asset growth. The VSL-only arm was found to increase food diversity, both at the household and at the child level. Despite a universal increase in food security, no reduction in the prevalence of child malnutrition is found as a result of the programs. Researchers continue to explore the likely reasons. Exploration of the role of social capital is also ongoing. Peer-reviewed results will be published later in 2013.

New Generation also focused on improving the well-being of vulnerable boys and girls. The project incorporated both a VSLA intervention (involving the establishment of VSLAs and provision of standard VSLA training, as well as provision of entrepreneurship and financial literacy education) and family-based discussion sessions. Overall, 1,595 households benefited from the project. The project aimed to determine the impact of the VSLA intervention on household economic outcomes and child protection and wellbeing outcomes, and to assess the added value of the discussion sessions on child protection and wellbeing. Key outcomes measured included household consumption expenditures, poverty rate, household assets, spending on children, child labor, discipline practices, child mental health, parent-child communication, family wellbeing, and child wellbeing (measured based on indicators defined by children and families).

Findings from the research showed that the VSLA intervention had a significant impact on household economic outcomes but little impact on child and family outcomes. The added family-based discussion sessions decreased harsh physical and verbal discipline by caregivers but, according to household surveys with caregivers, had little impact on parent-child communication, child labor, family functioning, family problems, child wellbeing, or mental health. The results from this evaluation are an important contribution to the growing evidence related to VSLA and family-based interventions in low-income and conflict-affected settings. However, the findings reveal that there is still much to learn to determine which interventions are most needed and result in the greatest improvements to child protection and wellbeing outcomes.

The final report on IRC’s New Generation project is available here.

Preliminary results from both research projects were presented at a thematic research session on “Outcomes for Children of Savings Groups Programs” at the 2013 annual Savings Group Conference in March.

Click here to view the SG 2013 presentation made by FHI 360, and visit the following link to learn more about the STRIVE project: http://microlinks.kdid.org/library/strive-factsheet.

Click here to view the SG 2013 presentation made by IRC.

Updated findings from both projects will be presented in the SEEP Network’s June 6 event/webinar, “Children, Youth, and Economic Strengthening (CYES) Seminar: Economic Strengthening Programs as Drivers of Child Well-being.”

Can Formal Work with Informal? Lessons, Opportunities and Challenges for Deepening Financial Inclusion

The SEEP Network — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:37:50 +0000

Can Formal work with Informal? Lessons, Opportunities and Challenges for Deepening Financial Inclusion from SEEP Network on Vimeo.

Virtual Event: This Webinar was held on May 21, 2013, at 9am.

Click here to download the presentation.

We would like to thank all of you who joined us for the live webinar “Can Formal Work with Informal ? Lessons, Opportunities and Challenges for Deepening Financial Inclusion”. For those of you who couldn’t join us, we are posting the resources from the webinar on this page. We would also like to invite you to post any questions you might have for the webinar presenters. Any questions posted in the next two weeks will be answered by the team. We plan to take this conversation further in the next few months and hope you will continue to stay engaged.

Can VSLAs work with Banks and other formal institutions?
What kind of preparation is needed among VSLAs and Banks/ institutions to do business together?
What has been the experience of the Banks, MFIs, mobile money service providers?

These are some of the questions that are explored in this webinar, based on experiences and lessons from 8 pilots in 5 countries (Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Malawi), linking VSLAs to institutions such as Barclays Bank, Vodafone, Vision Finance, and MicroEnsure.

Photo courtesy of Sarah Elliot/CARE

On May 21^st , 2013 at 9 am EST our webinar discussed lessons, opportunities and challenges emerging from CARE’s 8 financial linkage initiatives. Anuj Jain, Senior Fellow at Coady International Institute, facilitated.

The importance of expanding access to financial services for the world’s poorest people is increasingly recognized. But despite the growing international attention to the issue, numerous barriers remain. An estimated 2.5 billion people do not have an account with a bank or other financial institution, severely limiting their ability to save, invest and plan for their future.

Photo courtesy of Sarah Elliot/CARE

The “savings revolution” taking place in many developing countries, which has seen millions of people join informal community savings groups, is now being recognized as a possible solution. These groups fill some of the gap left by the absence of banks by allowing members to save flexibly, access small loans to invest in small businesses, and build a social fund to strengthen their ability to cope financially with unexpected events such as an illness in the family. CARE’s Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) group model has proven to be one of the world’s most effective, with over three million members in Africa alone.

Photo courtesy of CARE Kenya

To respond to emerging demands of VSLA members for broader range of financial products and services, CARE has tested eight innovative pilots, linking informal savings groups with formal financial institutions, with exciting results that could help deepen the financial inclusion and connect the developing world’s “unbanked” with the formal global economy.

Live from Istanbul: Child & Youth Finance International Summit 2013

The SEEP Network — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:44:26 +0000

Greetings from the CYFI summit in Istanbul! The SEEP Youth and Financial Services (YaFS) working group members, Rossana Ramirez (Freedom from Hunger) and Nicki Post (MEDA), co-facilitated the meeting “Understanding Youth and their Financial Needs: Innovations in Youth Financial Services” with Ben Mackay (ADA) and Laura Munoz (UNCDF), both representing the European Microfinance Platform’s (e-MFP) Youth Financial Inclusion Action Group. The presentation was standing room only with great engagement from participants and stellar moderation from Jared Penner (CYFI).

The presentation was a great opportunity for Rossana and Nicki to give a high level overview of what the new SEEP YaFS learning tool is, what it contains and how practitioners and Financial Service Providers can learn from the current experiences on youth financial and non-financial services projects that are underway globally. Both Rossana and Nicki were able to touch on some of the key learnings on youth and how several current programs have utilized this knowledge to inform their project and product development. That said, they were also quick to identify that this learning tool serves to capture what we know now about the youth segment, but that more learning and documentation is required in the future.

So what’s next? Both working group members highlighted the opportunity for collaboration in the future. e-MFP proposed a collaborative piloting of 1 model and document the outcomes. It was an additional goal among both working group members that further cross collaboration and engagement will be key in learning more about this dynamic and ever evolving market.

Why don’t you join the SEEP Youth and Financial Services working group to contribute to this growing discussion!

Lessons in Responsible Finance: Learning from the SEEP training in Dakar, Senegal

Bintou Ka-Niang — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:20:44 +0000

This post was written by Bintou Ka-Niang who will take over the position of Director of Association Development for the SEEP Network in May. Bintou is an international development and microenterprise finance specialist with over 20 years of experience throughout Africa, Europe, and Central America.

On March 24^th-26^th, in partnership with The MasterCard Foundation, SEEP hosted the first training session for the eight participating African Microfinance Associations (MFAs) in the SEEP Responsible Finance through Local Leadership in Sub-Saharan Africa Program. The Responsible Finance Program is a four year-partnership between the SEEP Network and The MasterCard Foundation to improve management capacity of microfinance associations, advance financial transparency, and promote consumer protection, in order to further the goal of promoting inclusive and responsible finance in Sub Saharan Africa.

This workshop was part of a larger effort to develop a strong learning platform to scale and sustain microfinance industry development in the region. Its specific goals were to increase knowledge of:

Codes of conduct and systems to support their application, by providing concrete examples of application and discussing strategies, processes and tools for putting these codes into practice, and
How to improve access to and use of relevant market information by a range of stakeholders, through discussion of tools, available reporting systems, and possible uses of collected information for deeper industry analysis.

For this workshop, SEEP convened close to thirty people comprised of MFA and SEEP staff, consultants working in the program, technical partners from MIX and ADA, and the Senegalese agency managing financial service consumer grievances, OQSF.

Network Capacity Assessments conducted for all the participating MFAs had shown large gaps in the areas of consumer protection and transparency and the ability of associations to address these needs in the market. The assessments revealed that while most of the MFAs had developed and adopted a code of conduct, they were facing challenges in their application. At the same time, financial and social reporting on members’ performance was still quite limited, creating problems for monitoring, tracking and informing decision making around financial, social, and consumer protection performance and compliance.

The training attempted to address these issues by exploring the evolving state of consumer protection and transparency in the different African markets represented. Sessions looked at general consumer protection principles (CPPs) along with the three pillars of responsible finance, and drew heavily from participating network practices to link theory to tangible challenges on the ground. Participating MFAs were asked to develop draft action plans for their work around consumer protection and transparency that they will continue to work on and refine under the project. These plans will become the basis for further tailored trainings on the topics to advance the consumer protection and transparency agendas in their countries.

Key lessons from the training included:

Code of conduct and Grievance systems

Implementing codes of conduct benefits all members; by holding them up to strict standards it indicates good quality of that MFI.
In countries where membership in an MFA is mandatory and the MFA has no real power to exclude members, self-regulation of the sector is more difficult to achieve.
The level of authority and the support provided by sector regulators to the MFA can make a big difference the degree to which associations are able to implement self-regulation
The type of MFIs represented by the MFA has a bearing on the effectiveness of compliance. The experience of one of Ghana’s MFAs for private companies has been that profit seeking MFIs value the high standards kept by the MFA and contribute more readily to activities that uphold these standards.
Advocacy that pushes regulators to commit to CPPs and require reporting on these principles could be a good way to get MFIs to adopt the principles.
Client education on the MFA code of conduct is important. But in order for MFAs to feel that their rights are being protected as well, this should be done at an MFA and clients level so that clients know not just their rights but also their obligations.
In countries where MFI financial reporting is directed to regulatory agencies that consolidate and publish the information for the whole sector, it is seen as less relevant for the MFA to focus on collecting and processing member performance, especially when all MFIs are required to be members of the MFA.
Grievance systems at the MFA level were not common. For the most part, consumer complaints are handled by government agencies or by MFIs directly; however, some of the participating MFAs are looking into building such systems
It is important for grievance systems to take into account the profile of the typical microfinance client, i.e. income and education level, geographic location, gender, etc. in order to put in place complaint submission and follow up mechanisms that are accessible to clients

For more information on the training and to access materials, please visit the Responsible Finance Program Activities page.

Social Performance Working Group Asia: SPI Certification by CERISE

Khadija Ali and Zahra Khalid — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:00:19 +0000

In 2012, the Social Performance Working Group (SPWG) Asia came together to build the capacity of member networks on the use of social audits, in particular the Social Performance Indicators (SPI) tool developed by CERISE (Comité d’Echange, de Réflexion et d’Information sur les Systèmes d’Epargne-crédit).

As part of a SEEP initiative to form a working group for networks promoting the social mission in microfinance, the Social Performance Working Group (SPWG) was created in 2009 in collaboration with the Social Performance Task Force (SPTF). The working group consists of five regional working groups in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. With twelve national networks from ten Asian countries (Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Lao PDR, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam) forming the core membership of the group, the SPWG Asia represents a diverse set of network associations in the region.

At the onset of 2012, the SPWG Asia devised a work plan for the year based on voting for pertinent themes and activities by the members. The highest votes received were for ‘capacity building on social audits’ because as Lalaine M. Joyas of the Microfinance Council of the Philippines, Inc. (MCPI) explained, social audits present a good ‘entry point’ for MFIs and other practitioners to learn about Social Performance Management (SPM).

The SPWG Asia set up its strategy on social audits through a main activity entitled the “SPWG Asia Regional Meeting and CERISE Social Audit Training”, which took place on February 20-22, 2012 in Bangkok, Thailand. The culmination of the working groups’ efforts in 2012 can be viewed in detail in the following field note: Social Performance Working Group (SPWG) Asia: CERISE SPI Certification in Social Audits for Associations.

The SPWG Asia Regional Meeting and CERISE Social Audit Training were made possible through the efforts of various donors and co-sponsors, whom members of the SPWG Asia reached out to specifically for this purpose. SEEP, CERISE, Plan International, OikoCredit, Grameen Crédit Agricole Microfinance Foundation and Incofin, all played a role in ensuring full participation from the SPWG Asia core members.

Upon completion of the training by CERISE, the working group drafted an action plan in which all national networks would complete social audits for two member microfinance institutions (MFIs) in 2012, adding up to a total of twenty-four social audits for Asia. CERISE continued to work closely with the networks throughout the year to review their social audits and facilitate the process of network certification on the SPI tool.

In terms of the participants’ experiences, networks members found the CERISE SPI tool comprehensive, well-structured and convenient to use. At the same time, networks feel that certain dimensions within the tool could be considered more or less relevant depending on the country-specific contexts, in which case greater flexibility would be helpful in terms of scores and weightages applied to different dimensions in the tool.

SPWG Asia members all appreciate the potential benefits of using social audits to highlight strengths and weaknesses in SPM mainstreaming in the sector. Furthermore, some Asian networks have since shared plans to conduct more social audits in 2013; this now being one of the innovative services to be provided by Asian networks to their member MFIs. A point of contention here is the issue of funding for regular and systematic SPI audits – whether this would be something MFIs are willing to pay for, or if the networks will continue to support their members through cost-sharing or other facilities.

Overall, the findings from social audits in 2012 revealed a number of common areas in which Asian MFIs would need to improve upon their SPM. While comparative analysis is useful in this respect, the report also highlights the need for individual, customized strategies depending on networks’ capacities to institutionalize and carry forward the social audit mission at the country level.

About the Authors:

Khadija Ali works as social responsibility associate at the PMN, facilitating the work of the Social Analyst in areas of client protection, social performance and financial education. Within these initiatives, she has been involved in the successful completion of several projects, including a 2012 World Bank project to develop learning and training modules on financial literacy for cash transfer program beneficiaries in Pakistan (primarily the beneficiaries of BISP and CDCP).

Zahra Khalid is managing the responsible finance portfolio at PMN including the social performance, client protection, and financial education initiatives, and has been closely involved in these initiatives since 2009. She has background experience in microfinance research and has been part of various research teams to publish industry research at the network. Since 2011, she has also served as a Board member of the Social Performance Task Force (SPTF), and served as regional facilitator for the Asia region on the global microfinance associations’ Social Performance Working Group during 2011-12.