Social Impact

FINCA Impact Finance is a double bottom line company delivering positive social impact and financial sustainability. Our role is to help people build financial health. We do this by providing low-income entrepreneurs and small businesses with financial products that help them manage their ongoing obligations, cope with setbacks and build resources for the future.  As an institution, our most important outcomes are defined by our customers themselves, and our performance metrics reflect their aspirations and concerns.  We measure our social performance in the same way we meet our financial targets—with rigor and honesty to make sure our products and services are positively changing the lives of the people we serve.

FIF uses three principles in the measurement of our social impact:

Outreach: Outreach looks at certain user indicators such as gender, poverty level, and location, to measure FIF’s reach. We know that women are disproportionately affected by poverty, and we regularly measure how many women we are reaching. In terms of location, we look at rural versus urban.

Usage: Product usage is what connects outreach to impact, because people utilize financial services in different ways to advance their families’ aspirations, such as saving for school fees or investing in better housing. For FIF, usage also tells us whether the services we provide are creating value in the communities we serve. For example, we measure the percentage of people for whom FIF is the main source of credit. We also look at customer satisfaction with loan size and the use of savings accounts.

Impact: The best measure of our impact is whether clients are meeting their own goals for a better life. We approach this question through the concept of financial health, meaning, are we helping families manage their resources better, both on a regular basis and towards the future.