India Microfinance Geographical Index: A Tool to Measure Microfinance Service Penetration Across India

In today’s financial services environment, data limited to institutional performance and country level aggregates are not sufficient to support healthy market development. New entrants need to navigate the existing landscape of financial services; long standing microfinance players need to assess the impact of competition on their own growth plans; and policy makers need to evaluate gaps and concentrations in cities, districts and local markets to develop policy to support financial inclusion. In all these instances, we need better tools to understand the financial services offerings across the varied landscapes of a given country.

MIX’s Microfinance Geographical Index developed in partnership with SIDBI under the India Microfinance Platform (IMFP), evaluates the level of microfinance service on a district-by-district basis across India. It assigns each district a score from ‘highly served’ to ‘not served’ based on MFI presence and service levels relative to local market opportunities, creating a simple reference for analysing market concentration and gaps.