Measuring Depth of Outreach: Tools for Microfinance

Richard L. Meyer, Geetha Nagarajan and Elizabeth G. Dunn
Additional contact information
Richard L. Meyer: Senior Research Specialist, Ohio State University
Geetha Nagarajan: Programme Manager, Microbanking Standards Project
Elizabeth G. Dunn: Research Assistant Professor, University versity of Missouri-Columbia

Bangladesh Development Studies, 2000, vol. 26, issue 2-3, 173-199

Abstract: The microfinance industry has made good progress in improving understanding about issues related to institutional performance. Increasingly, outreach and sustainability have been adopted as the two main criteria used to assess the performance of Microfinance Organizations (MFOs). The concept of institutional sustainability has been debated and refined, methods have been developed to use MFO accounting data to measure sustainability, and several studies have reported the level of and trends in the sustainability of many MFOs.1 The conceptualization and measurement of outreach is not as well developed. On the one hand, some aspects of outreach are easy to measure (e.g. the number and gender of clients served) and are regularly reported by MFOs. On the other hand, little progress has been made in developing simple tools to measure the depth of poverty of the clients served, that is how far down in the income distribution do the MFOs reach. A frequent question is whether or not MFOs reach the poorest of the poor. Loan size is often used as a proxy indicator for the poverty level of clients in the absence of better measures, but it is suspected of being a poor approximation

Keywords: Proxy reporting; Proxy statements; Rural poverty Undercoverage; Correlation coefficients (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
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