Sustaining Social Performance Institutionalising Organisational Learning and Poverty Outreach at Prizma

This paper presents the case of Prizma, a development organization working in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It has a mission to improve the well-being of poor and low-income women and their families, by providing long-term access to quality financial and non-financial services. The organization has an active clientele of roughly 10,000 people and it has been sustainable since 2001.

The paper outlines primary ways in which Prizma has set out to enhance and sustain social performance:

• Building capacity for and undertaking ongoing research;
• Leveraging leadership;
• Shaping organizational culture;
• Crafting appropriate incentives;
• Developing systems to assess poverty status and monitor impact.

Prizma's experience holds a number of lessons for development initiatives in the Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States (CEE-NIS) region:

• Good institutional design facilitates sustainable delivery of financial and allied services to the poor;
• Absolute focus and clarity of purpose is necessary for sustainable delivery;
• Efficiency and transparency are pre-requisites for outreach;
• Sustained services that lead to positive impact require understanding and differentiating between poor people's developmental needs and market wants.