Social Impact Assessment of Microfinance Programmes - weman

independent research studies to be carried out on its project’s efficiency and
effectiveness. There have been several research based publications on the OCT
programmatic directions and its impact. The thorough documentation of portfolio and
strategy changes as well as lessons learned and the regular progress reports, provide
tangible evidence of the prevalent research culture.
4.2 Survey Results
In this section we present the results from our survey for OCT. The results are based on
the data collected on the basis of the questionnaire – see 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 to 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 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.
OCT is the only MFI in our sample which is largely male client oriented. It also has other
characteristics which are dissimilar to other MFIs, as the Institutional Review above
suggests, particularly that it is not in the business of poverty alleviation, as most other
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