Working Groups

This briefing series is a SEEP Network initiative to introduce the concepts of social performance to the microenterprise field. The focus of this issue is social rating, and the issue includes articles on progress toward the development of social rating, a description of social rating products, and feedback from practitioners on social ratings.

This paper documents practitioners’ experiences and innovations in market development for income generation and livelihood security in crisis and post-crisis settings. War and natural disasters have devastating impacts on people’s ability to generate income and secure a sustainable livelihood that can help protect them from future shocks. Relief initiatives, in their admirable work to meet the basic needs of people affected by crisis, often inadvertently distort private sector markets and unintentionally create vulnerabilities and dependency. Market development (an approach to enterprise development, livelihood security, and pro-poor economic growth) attempts to avoid market distortion, and use the power of markets to move communities more rapidly from relief dependency to independent livelihood security. This practice is in early stages, but experience to date reveals several challenges and key lessons, discussed at length in the paper.

This briefing series is a SEEP Network initiative to introduce the concepts of social performance to the microenterprise field. In this issue: Social Performance Management; Imp-Act Consortium: Managing Social Performance; From the Field—Interview with Mila Mercado-Bunker,President of Ahon sa Hirap, Inc. (ASHI), Philippines; New Case Studies on Social Performance Management

These PowerPoints accompany the Branch Management Training for MFIs: Developing Staff Management Skills Facilitator Manual.

This learning paper explains a solution created by Covenant Centre for Development (CCD) and ekgaon technologies regarding how to capture information from an extremely decentralized network of savers and borrowers in self-help groups and centralize it in order to create accurate, timely, consolidated financial reports.