PRADAN (Professional Assistance for Development Action) is a large development NGO located in north India. Its core activity is promoting the livelihoods of around 40,000 poor women and their households in seven of India’s poorest states.
PRADAN believes that microfinance is not an end in itself, but an essential component of a wider rural livelihood strategy. Rather than providing financial services directly, it also concentrates on promoting user-controlled microfinance services in the form of Self-Help Groups (SHGs). To support this work it uses a mix of approaches for assessing its impact, or social performance, to serve both internal and external requirements.
The external agenda, particularly of funders and regional network partners, is important to PRADAN as it strives to promote the SHG-bank linkage model of microfinance integrated with other livelihood interventions as an alternative to minimalist models. In this context, PRADAN’s ability to keep in line with emerging industry-wide standards and benchmarks for social performance is important. The internal agenda of tracking and understanding programmewide patterns of socio-economic change in order to improve performance is also important. PRADAN employs a relatively non-hierarchical and semiautonomous structure of field teams of professionals operating in 29 districts in seven states. There is a need to first understand its social performance in these diverse regional settings, and then to streamline and systematise a standard process of promoting SHGs among all field staff. There are tensions among field staff as to the relative emphasis that should be placed on promoting village SHGs versus directly promoting livelihood activities. This article shows that good impact data in a participatory system can help to resolve these tensions and strengthen internal stakeholder relationships within and across PRADAN.
PRADAN’s mix of approaches to impact assessment has included externally driven “set-pieces” such as the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP) Poverty Assessment Tool (PAT) 1 to assess the extent of its poverty outreach. It has also carried out more traditional quantitative socioeconomic impact surveys. These methods have been selected principally to meet the objective of IDS Bulletin Vol 34 No 4 2003 “external proving”, but are also expected to inform the design of routine monitoring systems, including choice of social indicators.
The core to PRADAN’s strategy for institutionalising social performance assessment is the Internal Learning System (ILS), an on-going participant and programme learning and planning system largely developed internally. The selection of this method is primarily, although not exclusively, for the objective of “internal learning” in order to “improve” programme interventions, and in particular to enhance their utilisation by participants, to better achieve social performance objectives and goals. ILS should guide participants through a process of analysing their livelihood situation, so that they can make strategic decisions about the use of scarce resources, including credit. ILS should also encourage participants to reflect on their social, economic and political status, so that they struggle individually and collectively to achieve their strategic interests, as well as meet their practical needs. The aim is to create simple analysis and planning formats that encourage participants to better understand their changing situation and alter their own individual and group plans or behaviour, summon needed training inputs and demand services, negotiate with financial intermediaries, and challenge inequitable structures and practices.
In the context of Copestake’s synthesis framework for identifying and measuring social performance goals (2003), this article briefly discusses the overall strategy for social performance assessment that PRADAN has initiated. Gaps in measuring different dimensions of social performance goals are identified and potential solutions are discussed. The role of the ILS in measuring social performance goals is described in detail and difficulties in institutionalising ILS throughout PRADAN are discussed.
Related Content
This article comes from the IDS Bulletin 34.4 (2003) 6. Assessing the Impact of PRADAN’s Microfinance and Livelihoods Interventions: The Role of the Internal Learning System
