Paper

How Can Impact Assessments Facilitate Stronger Collaboration Between DFOs?

What links networking and experimentation?

This paper examines whether impact assessment can enable present and future networks to provide a basis for stronger collaboration and information sharing between microfinance organizations.

The paper suggests that microfinance, like microenterprise, has grown up in a spontaneous, unorganized, and competitive manner. Nobody would have planned such a system, and nobody did. However, as the microfinance industry grows, it is evolving its own norms and performance standards; and, both within and across countries, networks and professional organizations now exist to monitor and improve performance in relation to those standards.

The paper concludes that the way forward has been pointed out by MICROSAVE of Uganda - a commitment to the comparative assessment of different types of savings models. The field would seem open for similar clusters working on specialized products, which might themselves have a regional base. Similarly, there seems to be unlimited scope for regional or global groupings committed to the assessment of the impact of specific and possibly innovative financial products.

About this Publication

By Mosley, P., Johnson, S. & Simanowitz, A.
Published