What's the impact of microfinance? A question with 150 million answers, one for every client around the world who receives microfinance services.
Academics who wield sophisticated statistical tools to assess complex social phenomena like microfinance give answers with more precision, but they don't always spend much time explaining their results to a broader public. And the press likes to give stories hard-hitting headlines whenever they can. Outcome: much of what the public reads in the press does not accurately reflect the studies. The press take on the most recent raft of studies about microfinance caused heartburn among both microfinance promoters and academics, as Nicholas Kristof reported in his New York Times blog.
Into the fray comes Grameen Foundation with a paper by Kathleen Odell, an economist from Dominican University. Odell's paper, "Measuring the Impact of Microfinance: Taking Another Look," provides a guide to ten of the most important studies on the impact of microfinance in the past five years. The Grameen Foundation paper helps the non-academic reader understand both how the impact studies were conducted and what they are finding. While the author is clearly sympathetic to microfinance, she reports both positive and negative findings faithfully, making an important contribution to an often-contentious conversation. I won't go into the complex methodology arguments here; instead I'll look at the study findings.
No one study gives a definitive answer to the impact question. Each one tells us something about how microfinance is affecting clients of a particular provider in a specific time and place. As Odell writes, "Each impact study must be interpreted as a small piece of a growing body of knowledge about how microfinance, in all its forms, functions in the world and how it affects the lives of the poor." Through many studies one can piece together a rich, complex picture. Here are some of the most important findings from the batch of studies covered in Odell's report, ordered roughly from most to least positive.
These moderate results might be disappointing if you were expecting microfinance magic to cure poverty. But they are just what you'd expect if you think microfinance is about bringing financial services to people who never had them before -- and hence the kind of incremental, supportive, and occasionally transformational benefits that effective financial services bring to people at any wealth level.
As the impact picture grows into sharper focus, it's time to think about action. After all, the purpose of the studies is to guide the actions of the people and organizations making decisions about microfinance. What do the results tell microfinance professionals and supporters to actually do?
Two things, both of which reinforce trends already at work in the microfinance sector.
First, microfinance providers should strive to improve the products they offer, for example by adding savings and other services to basic microcredit. When the studies reveal that people used microfinance in different ways depending on their needs, and that savings is as useful as credit, they give a strong endorsement for providing a full suite of financial services, flexible enough for people to use them for whatever they need most.
Second, supporters of microfinance should demand scale and sustainability when they make charitable contributions. The finding that microfinance plays a facilitating role and has mostly incremental effects on customers should signal supporters of microfinance to be cost-conscious. They should seek to bring the benefits of microfinance to many people at low cost so that the benefits outweigh the costs. Fortunately, microfinance offers very high leverage on aid. When subsidies are used to create microfinance institutions capable of serving many people on an ongoing basis, or to develop a new kind of product, a small contribution goes a long way. The aim of aid, in other words, should be to build self-sustaining microfinance organizations that provide excellent services to their low-income clients without the need for ongoing charity.
You've done an excellent job summarizing Kathleen Odell's paper. Thank you for drawing attention to her contribution to the field, building on Nathanael Goldberg's 2005 "Measuring the Impact of Microfinance: Taking Stock of What We Know." It is indeed important to underscore that no one study or methodology can be considered to represent the definitive statement on whether microfinance works (as if there were one monolithic microfinance industry/appraoch).
Your final comments left me pondering. You say that first, microfinance must use these findings to enhance product offerings and second, that philanthropists should demand scale and sustainability. True enough on some level. However, in some markets I see improving the quality of microfinance offerings running at cross purposes with the desire for scale and sustainability/profitablity. Second, I think we should take pains to define sustainability as broadly as possible. We can think of it in terms of financial sustainability, social sustainability, environmental sustainability. Ultimitely, sustainability means "long lasting" and microfinance has stood the rest of time but clearly needs to reinvent itself as all social innovations must do from time to time.
Alex Counts
Grameen Foundation
www.gfusa.org
Jan Piercy, ShoreBank