Developing a macro- and micro-metrics package for microfinance institutions

Abstract

This paper attempted to extract from the literature a package of measures, or metrics, that can be used by microcredit programs and institutions to gauge their success as financial institutions, as well as their broader societal impact as welfare organizations. What was learned is that microcredit organizations, unlike more traditional financial institutions, are largely unregulated and therefore tend to use of variety of non-standardized measures to assess their success and sustainability. Moreover, it is clear that microfinance institutions can not easily trade-off those measures that track institutional success, for those that measure the well-being of the community as a result of borrowing money and mounting a micro-enterprise, since a number of confounding factors make direct correlation difficult. By employing the Balanced Scorecard framework, microcredit organizations can collect regularly data that reports on the financial status of the organization, its internal business practices, the rate of borrower success, and lessons learned. Moreover, the microcredit organization that assumes to impact the borrower community at large, can use the same framework to aggregate these data across borrower communities and monitor them along with certain health and welfare data to infer a degree of behavioral impact.