Social Impact Assessment of Microfinance Programmes - weman

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 and 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.
In the case of Asasah, we were lucky enough to be able to distinguish between old and
new areas, and the Active Borrowers were interviewed in their branches of Yadgar,
Raiwind and Kot Radhakrishan. The ‘new’ areas where Asasah has only recently started
work where our survey was conducted, were Gujranwala and Kamoke. The neighbours
from both ‘old’ and ‘new’ areas constitute our ‘Non-Borrower’ category.
We first discuss results based on tables presented in the Appendix to this Chapter.
Since Asasah has been in operation just a few years, 86 percent of its clients are still only
in their first or second loan cycles. Clearly, any ‘impact’ of the intervention by
microfinance institutions, is highly tenuous, and at best, slight and partial. We would
expect little to have changed in a matter of two years, and to find not much significant
difference between Active Borrowers, Pipeline Borrowers and Non-Borrowers. Most of
the tables in the Appendix suggest so as well.
Most of Asasah’s clients, all of whom are women, are involved in ‘business/retail shops’
or ‘cottage industries’ – Table A.3.2.4 – although what is interesting, is that there are
fewer Non-Borrowers who are involved in the former category, suggesting that perhaps
once women acquire a loan, they move on to setting up or expanding a ‘business/retail
shop’. Amongst the numerous similarities between all three categories, one which Table
A.3.2.9 shows, is that around 70 percent of girls and 85 percent of boys, irrespective of
them being a member or not, attend school, and that vaccination levels are also similarly
high. Table A.3.2.12 shows that almost all women, irrespective of their relationship to
Asasah, have an additional source of household income, other than what they themselves
earn.
The perceptions of clients and non-clients about various aspects of their lives, make
interesting reading. Table A.3.2.26 on the perceptions of clients over the loan cycle about
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