How we measure our impact
Opportunity International Australia is a socially focused microfinance supporter. The ultimate goal of everything we do is to help people lift themselves out of poverty. In order to measure the success of our programs, we need a tool that will allow us and our partners to determine the impact we are having in the lives of the people we serve.
Opportunity’s Social Performance Management (SPM) program continued in 2011, enabling our partners to assess, measure and refine our programs to ensure that your donations are making the greatest impact possible in the lives of people living in poverty.
In 2011, 12 of Opportunity’s microfinance partners in India began or continued with the SPM program with the assistance of external experts. In 2012, another two partners will begin implementing SPM.
Our partners are focusing on three key components of SPM to deliver quality services that effectively reduce poverty for our clients: client protection, outreach and transformation. Opportunity is working with our partners to assess and improve their client protection measures and to ensure that they are reaching people living in poverty in underserved regions and transforming their lives.
SPM is a program of continually monitoring clients’ circumstances and how they change over time, so that we can better understand the impact of our programs. The ‘Progress out of Poverty Index’ (PPI) scorecard is an innovative tool that helps us do just that, monitoring the effects of microfinance on income levels. The scorecard includes simple questions related to the client’s income level, including assets owned, fuel used for cooking and the condition of the home. We also ask additional questions about the client’s quality of life, for example; can the client access healthcare? Does the client have access to safe drinking water? Depending on the answers to all of these questions, we are able to estimate the relative income levels and poverty status of our clients.
One partner in the Philippines, ASKI, has been accredited to use the PPI scorecard to measure client poverty levels independent of external support. With capable staff and strong social performance processes, ASKI uses this to develop more client-focused programs.
At the end of 2011, Opportunity piloted a new methodology – Social Return on Investment (SROI) – with one of our partners. This is a framework for understanding, measuring and reporting on the value that is created by an organisation, an activity or a service – in our case, microfinance. This concept of value includes social, economic and environmental costs and benefits created by the activity. SROI tells the story of how change is being created by measuring the outcomes and using monetary values to represent them. The data is collected through one-on-one interviews and focus groups with clients, enabling us to understand what they believe to be the major changes they have experienced as a result of our programs. SROI is a detailed study of transformation carried out at a single point in time – it complements the ongoing work on outreach, transformation and client protection that we are doing through our SPM program.
Both of these tools help us and our partners understand the effectiveness of our services. The information we collate over time will help us shape, refine and improve our programs and help increase our impact on the lives of people living in poverty.
More than anything, Opportunity wants to see people leave poverty behind. Impact assessment helps us to be more effective, reach more people and continually help them the best we can. Effectively, it’s the translation of our social mission into practice.