Social performance: A "raison d'ětre" for micro finance institutions...and yet, still not much measured. Some initiatives

Abstract

Historically, microfinance has been successful in reaching the population excluded from the classical financial system. In the 90's, efforts have been concentrated towards financial and institutional sustainability of the microfinance institutions (MFIs). Tools to evaluate financial performances have been developed, but the social performances were taken for granted. However, nowadays, donors and social investors ask the MFIs to justify the fundings? Who are the clients reached ? How to combine social and financial objectives ? How to avoid mission drift ? etc. Some MFIs themselves have the intuition that reinforcing social performances can lead, on the mid run, to strengthen financial sustainability. Some initiatives have flourished, trying to identify few indicators that could be used to assess the social process followed by the MFIs. Stakes of these measures, an overview of some of the recent initiatives, and one of them, the social performance indicators initiative (SPI). This last initiative is aimed at defining a tool for social audit based on a questionnaire divided in four "social dimensions": (1) outreach of the poor and excluded ; (2) adaptation of the services and products to the target clients ; (3) improvement of social and political capital of the clients ; (4) social responsibility of the MFI.