Boxed Text: The Presentations
Box 3:
Liz McGuiness, Save the Children
Save
the Children (STC) began its microfinance activities in 1994
in the Arab States region. By 1997 it had achieved an outreach
of 15,000, and currently serves a total of 125,000 clients in
17 countries. In order to achieve its goal of improving children’s
lives, STC has developed effective methodologies for reaching
women, who are organized into solidarity groups in order to receive
mutually guaranteed loans that increase in size over time. Rather
than partnering with existing organizations, STC’s operational
strategy in this endeavor has been to build strong local MFIs
by either spinning off its own programmes or launching independent
MFIs from scratch. In addition to child-centeredness, gender equity1,
and empowerment, its programme principles in microfinance revolve
around sustainability, scale, and measurable impact.
In order to
put this last principle into practice, STC recently undertook
two impact assessments of microfinance programmes in Morocco and
Afghanistan, both of which included women’s empowerment as
one of the assessment domains. In Afghanistan, the evaluation
team used STC’s own monitoring and evaluation handbook to
gather quantitative data. The question “Who made the last
decision in your family with regard to…” was asked in
reference to eight household decision-making areas, such as marriage
of children, housing improvement, and borrowing money. In Morocco,
the impact assessment used the AIMS Tools developed by the SEEP
Network in conjunction with USAID, and explored 13 different decision
making areas.
Neither assessment found any statistically significant differences in decision making patterns between clients and non-clients, necessitating a deeper probing of empowerment issues. In Morocco, this was accomplished by gathering qualitative data alongside the quantitative information, through personal interviews and focus groups. This investigation sought 1) to determine if clients have grown more confident and gained more self-esteem while participating in the programme; and 2) to identify how those qualities have translated into specific changes in their behaviour that demonstrate empowerment, especially in terms of increased control over resources. Results from these qualitative methods produced a rich picture of how participation in microfinance programmes had changed individual women’s lives. Clients described positive effects at individual, enterprise, and household levels. However, the limited sample size necessitated by time-consuming qualitative techniques means that these conclusions could not be generalized to the entire population of microfinance clients. Therefore, finding ways to obtain generalizable results, in order to have some sense of certainty that these programmes are having a positive impact on women’s empowerment, still remains a challenge.
