EDIAIS :Conference papers

Smita Premchander, Secretary, Sampark, 410, Block 3, Koramangala, Bangalore 560 034. India http://www.sampark.org , e-mail: smitapremchander@yahoo.co.in

Learning from Impact Assessments: Does Understanding Women's Perspectives Change MF Programmes?

Link to full paper

ABSTRACT

Microfinance has emerged as a major development tool in India, using a minimalist approach, that emphasizes giving only one input, credit, to the exclusion of all others as an agent of change. There is a need to examine whether such an approach to syndrome mitigation has the intended impact of reducing poverty, especially of rural women. The traditional supply perspective views the transfer and use of money, and the impact of such use. However, money is just one of the many resources that women use creatively to improve their livelihoods, which are comprised of several complex factors not only income generating activities. A good view of impact can only be obtained by understanding the individual, social, economic and learning processes that cause impact. This is the argument for "Turning the Telescope around", and study impact from the perspective of women themselves.

This paper outlines experience from studying impact of two large microfinance programmes in India, one in Jharkhand and another in Orissa. The processes that cause greater impact are not related to credit, but to savings and to the collective learning processes that take place in groups. However, this finding of impact does not inform the microfinance programmes, which themselves continue to focus on financial aspects, sustainability, thereby leading to centralisation rather than decentralisation, and to women's lack of control over the microfinancial services offered to them. The ownership and management of microfinance institutions is considered a separate issue, and designers of such programmes and institutions do not see an intimate link between the type of institution, the type of products offered, and the impact, not only in financial, but also in social and empowerment terms.

This brings to fore the fact that even if impact assessments highlight the processes that cause impact, microfinance programmes find it difficult to accommodate this learning into further programme design. There is an attitudinal block in the design of microfinance programmes in India, which arises in part from an international trend towards sustainable microfinance institutions, and in part from the Indian context of scaling up through the government, making each programme target oriented and thereby making it ineffective.

The paper argues that while we learn several valuable lessons about how impact takes place, these lessons are not taken into account in the design of microfinance programmes in particular, and development programmes in general. It asks the question of whether participatory and people -oriented impact assessments can bridge the disconnect that exists between microfinance practices and the ground reality of women's livelihoods in India.

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