Entries tagged with poverty outreach

An interview with Tara Murphy Forde, Senior Vice President, Research & Impact, Global Partnerships

Global Partnerships (GP) is an impact-first investor dedicated to expanding opportunity for people living in poverty. At GP, we create and manage funds that make loans and early stage investments in social enterprises that serve people living in poverty throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa. Five years ago, we spun out our Research and Impact Team to strategically define, measure, and strengthen the impact of our investments. As part of this effort, we developed a poverty measurement methodology that helps us understand whether our investments are reaching those we aim to serve.

Today we use poverty data to screen, select, and monitor the outreach of our social enterprise partners and our analysis informs our investment decisions; not only whether to invest, but on what terms. We continue to iterate and strengthen our approach, but there have been some key steps and learnings along the way, which I will attempt to distill here in the event they are of service to others embarking on a similar pursuit.

As you may know, in October 2015, the World Bank released the new International Poverty Line. The new line boosts the 2005 level, $1.25 based on 2011 local prices converted to US dollars, up to $1.90/day. While it seems like a simple adjustment, measuring poverty across times and countries is an inherently fuzzy process.

The purpose of this second installment of the PPI Practitioner Guidance Series (read the first installment here) is to explain why these two lines are not necessarily equivalent at the level of individual countries, and how PPI users who are currently using the 2005 PPP lines to measure poverty may transition to using the 2011 PPP lines.

Guest-blog by Anne Hastings, Executive Director, Microfinance CEO Working Group. Cross-posted from CFI-Accion.

At a time when microfinance has fallen out of favor in mainstream development circles and when investors are asking to see metrics showing the impact of their funding, it is especially important to base our discussions of poverty outreach on empirical research. Grameen Foundation and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) recently published a study that does just this. Factors Influencing Poverty Outreach Among Microfinance Institutions in Latin America (also available in Spanish) takes a close look at poverty outreach data from 14 microfinance institutions (MFIs) across six Latin American countries and is the first study of its kind in the region.