Sustainable Microfinance - Balanced Scorecard's added value for ...

Appendix Q – Measurement and Indicators
!
KH How many people actually visit the location? How long do people stay?
KH similar to job interviews, how do you know the person can do it?
KH have an interview for the last round with someone, than you will get a feeling.
TB The first group relates to the objectives of the performance of the individual expansion. What is the
quality of a debtor of such a business plan etc, etc?
TB The second set of standard, measurements relates to the performance of your credit organization.
What are my costs, what are the costs of funding, what are my financial characteristics, what is the
rating of my organization?
TB The third set of observations relates to the question, what economic, what social and what objectives
has this bank in the given working area, a country, county, city, village, maybe a enterprise network,
the farmers bank in... etc, etc?
TB How are these objectives formulated? And what measurements do you have to check whether the
bank is making a contribution towards that?
TB From there, you could start developing some kind of Balanced Scorecard and than it would appear that
in most of the cases initially a lot of attention is for the performance
TB also social objective need to be able to be measured otherwise that are not good.
TB the economical output of that group needs to provide a contribution, for example to the GDP that is the
same as the contribution of the average Dutch person.
TB it goes wrong due to the measurements and especially the financial measurements that we link with to
a single perspective. From the lending company or the investing company
TB do the output measurement in bags of potatoes or something similar. It is completely irrelevant if I have
made !100.000, -
TB the goal should be to break even
TB Also HRM systems, 90% is about rewards. I know from experience that that is not true, especially for
people of my age.
RL we know that people will use the site to search, but how do you measure a search function?
OE than back to the action plan, where do you want to be in 6 months, and what needs to be done in the
mean time?
OE When you say now, in five years I want to do this and this, it does not mean that you cannot change
your plan in the mean time
AP For example MFI want to improve the living conditions of their costumers. How do we create insight,
and how can we check whether that is really happening?
AP In first instance that is really about the measurement, how do you make sure you measure something
that you know how well you are doing?
AP Second how do I use the information I measured in my internal business processes, to use that in a
strategic way. When I see, that my customers, my microfinance customers do not get better from it, by
income or assets or whatever.
AP What I find important is that when you implement this at a MFI, than what is the mission of that MFI?
When that is the empowerment of women, if that is your mission, than you need to be able to say
something about that.
AP Is that going good, how many women did we empower, what is that and how do we measure that?
AP If you are a MFI that does not focus on woman, than I do not think it makes a lot of sense to measure
the percentage of women.
AP In that perspective, if you talk about do you measure millennium goals, which are still relatively broad. I
am more specific, I sit down with them and talk about; 'what is your mission and what concrete
objectives can you filter from that, and from there measure.
AP you can look at several things, you can look at what type of customers do I have? Most organizations
say we focus on poor costumers. Than, I want to see that. Than you will help such an organization to
measure whether they are helping the right target group.
Elmar Hoogendoorn 133
Sustainable Microfinance