Social Impact Assessment of Microfinance Programmes - weman

Akhuwat is performing much better than its peers and due to this indicator, Akhuwat will
be able to achieve sustainability in time.
Akhuwat has an impressive lending model built on local traditions and it would be more
than 100 percent sustainable if it were charging interest on its loans as its recovery is
almost 100 percent, and operating expenses are very low. But the premise on which the
organization has been established, prohibits it to charge any interest; consequently, as
outreach increases over time and costs per borrower fall due to economies of scale,
sustainability will also increase.
5.2 Survey Results
In this section we present the results from our survey for Akhuwat. The results are based
on the data collected on the basis of the questionnaire – see the Appendix of the Report.
A select few of the results are presented here in table form, in the main text of this
Chapter, while the substantial majority of tables are presented in the Appendix of the
Chapter. The Appendix to this Chapter contains the largely ‘descriptive’ tables and
results, while the tables which are part of the text in this Chapter, are the more
‘analytical’ tables. In the Appendix to this Chapter, there are far more tables than those
on which we offer comments in the text. Many of these tables are simply informative and
so we do not discuss them in the Chapter. They are being provided for the reader’s own
interest and perusal. Only the more interesting, striking or pertinent results and tables
from the Appendix are discussed in the text.
As we show in Chapter 2, the survey was conducted across four types of populations for
the purposes of the Study. Two of the categories are ‘clients’ or ‘borrowers’, while the
other two are ‘non-clients’. In the borrower/client category, there are two types of clients,
the ‘Active Borrowers’ and the ‘Pipeline Borrowers’. The former category that of ‘Active
Borrower’, is that client who has been in the programme of the MFI for longer than ten
months; s/he may have been a client for some years in their nth loan cycle or may have
even been a client in their first year. ‘Pipeline Borrowers’ are classified as those new
clients who had joined the programme of the MFI a few months – usually between 1-4
months – of the start of our survey. There are also two categories of ‘Non-Borrowers’,
one which are selected from the neighbourhood of the old Active Borrowers, and the
other from the neighbourhood of Pipeline Borrowers. Ideally, and in the best case
possible, the Active Borrower and the Pipeline Borrower (and their neighbours) should
have been chosen from ‘old/established’ areas where the MFI has been working for some
years, and ‘new’ areas where they are about to enter an identify and enlist clients.
However, in many cases this was not possible since most MFIs did not have exclusively
‘new’ areas identified, and we were forced to take Active Borrowers and Pipeline
Borrowers, and both sets of their neighbours, from the same locality/area. Nevertheless,
this does not undermine our results which are presented in this Section. In some cases we
present results where we compare the Active Borrower with Pipeline Borrowers, and in
some cases we compare both Active Borrowers and Pipeline Borrowers with the two
combined categories of neighbours, that of Non-Borrowers.
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