Social Performance Management at MicroLoan

What is social performance management?  It is about improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of what we are already doing, at all levels of the organisation, in order to meet clients’ needs more effectively and fulfill the social mission, that being to work with the poorest women and enable them to move out of poverty.

Why is social performance important to MicroLoan?

It is a clear way to understand how we are performing against our social goals or what steps may need to be taken in order to improve social performance, to ensure we are on track in fulfilling our social mission. We need to look at if we are in fact reaching the poorest individuals and making a difference in their lives.

Consequently innovative products, that meet client’s needs, such as Chiyambi (product aimed at the poorest) and Makwelero (monthly repayment product) have been successfully piloted.

How is Social Performance improved?

Social Performance can be improved in any number of ways, depending on the needs of the organisation. In MicroLoan’s case for example, we have been focusing on improving our client training to ensure that it is more structured and participatory, so that clients form well functioning groups and are well equipped with the necessary skills to run a successful business. We’ve also been working on integrating client protection principles into our day to day work to ensure our clients are not over-indebted, understand their rights and are given regular opportunities to feed back their thoughts to management so we can continuously work to improve our products and services.

Your donations and support are greatly appreciated; it truly helps us reach the poorest women in Sub-Saharan Africa and gives them the opportunity to receive a hand up from poverty. 

Links:

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"Tilime" agricultural loans - Our agronomist volunteer Leslie Lyle has carried out a second research trip to Malawi, introducing new procedures. These changes appear to have been successful and the quality of client understanding of agricultural issues and the quality of the farming practices has improved as a result. This places clients in a stronger position when planning their farming activities, and coping with the current challenges of depressed crop prices. The regular MicroLoan workshops and inputs by local agricultural expert officers are helping the women diversify their crops more successfully. In order to implement our new staff training curriculum, we have placed a long term volunteer (Melanie Harbinson) for one year trialling and testing the Deloitte UK developed training modules so they can be subsequently fully rolled out as a 'MicroLoan curriculum'. This should not only lead to better performing staff but will be a key motivation tool, as staff clearly value investment in their own personal development. One of our new initiatives is 'solar enterprise'. Only 8% of Malawians are connected to the national grid so solar energy is extremely important. We are training and mentoring our clients in marketing, how to work and repair devices, and managing stock. In our picture is Veronica, whom Michael McGrath (Head of Fundraising) and Ida Levine (Trustee) met in May. With her tea shop failing to generate sufficient income, she is now making a significant amount of additional money from solar initiatives. It was amazing to learn that she has pre-orders for this service for the next month and a local school wants to purchase her entire next stock of ten solar packs! You can see her here, alongside her solar panels, charging a box of LED lamps and mobile phones for her local customers.

Your donations are already working really hard - thank you so much! You've helped fund our latest project - our Solar Women.

With just 8% of Malawians connected to a national grid and even that becoming increasingly unreliable of late, MicroLoan has been developing some new business opportunities for the women we help to benefit from solar energy.

Imagine being totally constrained by nature for the ability to read or to undertake certain critical tasks, just because it is after 6pm? This is the reality for many women and their families in Africa, with their only lighting up until now being from kerosene lamps and candles. These not only offer poor light, but also have a whole host of health problems associated with them. Kerosene lamps are huge contributor to respiratory problems, particularly amongst children and are the cause of horrendous burns and even fatalities if accidentally knocked over, as is easily done in cramped conditions.Candles can also prove dangerous and are a relatively costly expense every day.

Enter clean, safe and reliable solar energy.

MicroLoan has set up nine new women as solar entrepreneurs in and around the Kasungu area. The product consists of a small 1.5w solar panel, an LED light, a mobile phone battery charger and battery pack which stores the solar energy. It has been specifically designed for poor rural settings.

The women were selected on the basis of their successful business backgrounds and their ability to sell new products well. The women attended a two and a half day training workshop in Kasungu during which time they learned how their panels worked, how to repair faulty units, how to charge clients mobile batteries, how to find clients and how to record their sales.

Working in the London office of MicroLoan, and having lived and worked in Africa, I don’t consider myself to be naïve about the breadth and depth of poverty that some communities are struck with, and the myriad of social problems that this can cause. However, my first trip to Malawi with MicroLoan was still a shock for me.
 
We work hard to ensure that we support the very poorest women.  Women who I met that were new to MicroLoan or in their early loan cycles often had many small children with them, some theirs, others orphans who they had taken in following the death of a family member. Their children were often dressed in rags and chewing on corn-less cobs, their clothes held together with safety pins. Their modest subsistence farm plots were parched and dry. There seem to be so few options for the women that we work with, but yet when given a dignified and sustainable opportunity to improve their circumstances they have proved to be natural entrepreneurs and innovators. It is because of this that a small loan to purchase an irrigation kit, with careful mentoring and training, can help a woman produce a lush and fertile bed of food both for the family to eat and to sell for cash at local markets.
 

I was struck by so many contrasting feelings. I felt sympathy for the situation the women we help find themselves in, but also respect, in much greater measure. When you are talking one to one with a woman who is in the process of transforming her life and offering her children a better chance than she ever had, all the statistics on poverty fade away. A small difference in a rural community will have immense trickle down effects and change the lives of future generations. Children are sent to school, properly fed and clothed, and the whole family benefits from being able to afford basic medical care and better nutrition.

   
From the ever changing looks of sadness, joy and incredulity, I know the four supporters that came on the trip with me went on the same emotional rollercoaster.

The first stop on our trip was MicroLoan’s head office in Kasungu where our Malawian CEO James spoke passionately about the difference MicroLoan is making. MicroLoan employs talented local people who understand the latent issues in the countries where we work. This creates local employment which makes our work more sustainable, as well as capitalising on local relationships and knowledge.

On our second day, an hour’s journey north takes us to the first of groups we are visiting – the Chitemwa group. The women of Chitemwa have used their loans to increase their farming productivity to ensure food security for the local area for the coming years. We had a really interesting discussion with the women about the strengths and weaknesses of their businesses and we were proudly shown their flourishing irrigated plots full of healthy cabbages, tomatoes and maize. The difference between MicroLoan borrowers’ plots and their neighbours’ non-irrigated dust bowl land was stark.

The women that we met were amazingly hospitable, and insisted that we stay for sodas and biscuits that they had bought for us, even though they were obviously busy with their farming, with throngs of hungry children vying for their attention as we approached lunch time. Driving through the open parched landscapes back to Kasungu it was impossible to ignore how difficult it must be to eek a living out of dry, cracked and remote land. In spite of the fact that they were all very busy, they took time out of their days to welcome us and we all danced and sang together. We all felt very humbled by the hospitality we had been shown.

We then visited MicroLoan Foundation’s knitting and sewing school, which is an urban enterprise, where women are taught skills that add value to their businesses. Many women were knitting shawls for babies, or sewing dresses out of traditional African fabrics. The women that we met were proud of their work and there was obviously a lot of hard work and care being taken in the knowledge that the extra skills they had learnt from MicroLoan’s training would go a long way to ensuring their businesses pull them out of poverty.

For me, this is what giving a hand up all is about. Sustainable small improvements through access to credit, training and mentoring, that allow women to give their children opportunities that they never had, without creating a cycle of dependency….and this is what MicroLoan want to do for as many women in Africa as possible.

Links:

• Video of some of the women we visited