Increasing Access and Benefits for Women: Practices and Innovations Among Microfinance Institutions

The report presents the findings of a survey to assess the state of outreach to women in the microfinance industry today and to take stock of recent innovations developed by practitioners to better serve this market. Survey asked questions about specific products and services that MFIs have developed to serve women, the ways in which these are being delivered, the markets and clients targeted by the organisation, and the outcomes of these endeavors. 29 institutions that responded to the survey - all but one offer loans, ten mobilise savings, and four offer some form of insurance as well. Seven reported having reached financial self-sufficiency. There was found to be no correlation with an institution's self-sufficiency and its percentage of women clients; in fact, one of the institutions with the highest financial self-sufficiency ratio had a membership made up exclusively of poor women. This suggests that financial viability is a goal not incompatible with substantial outreach to poor women.

The survey revealed that best practices with respect to serving women clients have been fairly widely adopted among the sampled institutions, especially with respect to credit activities:

• Respondents were found to employ two main types of strategies to increase women's access to and benefits from microfinance: product adaptations and process adaptations;
• Savings, credit, and insurance products have been developed specifically in response to needs expressed by women clients, such as for children's education, old-age pensions, and medical expenses;
• Process adaptations included recruiting women at appropriate places in the field and hiring women staff to effectively interface with women clients;
• Participatory processes helped to build women's sense of investment in the program as well as their leadership and organisational capacities, and were one way in which institutions demonstrated their commitment to ensuring that access to microfinance translated into broader benefits for women.

[Author's abstract]