Microfinance Initiatives: ACCION

ACCION

The ACCION social diagnostic tool is a framework through which to assess social performance in order to evaluate the success of the MFI in fulfilling its social mission and contributing to broadly accepted social goals. This specialized framework for evaluating microfinance institutions is based on existing mainstream tools that assess social performance as well as surveys on the information demands and practices of socially responsible investors. SOCIAL (social mission, outreach, client service, information transparency and consumer protection, association with the community, labor climate) offers a comprehensive social assessment of the MFI to complement the financial assessment provided by the CAMEL (ACCION's tool to measure capital adequacy, asset quality, management, earnings, and liquidity of microfinance institutions).

The social classification includes interviews with management, staff, board members, and clients; reviews the strategic and business plans and minutes of board meetings; reviews data from the MFI's client database; gathers data from external surveys or other sources to validate the MFI's database and searches secondary source data, such as national data, the MIX, market studies, etc.; creates a map of geographic coverage; and makes branch visits. ACCION's social performance assessment team provides social audits of microfinance institutions that result in a detailed social audit report for the institution and a social scorecard. ACCION also offers a social performance self-assessment tool that enables microfinance institutions to evaluate themselves using a checklist of key indicators.

For more information please contact Deborah Drake at ACCION: ddrake@accion.org.