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Supporting organisations to deliver on good intentions

Sometimes seeing is the first obstacle to better outreach to the poorest

17/3/2015

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Photo credit: K. Knotts
"In my work with microfinance organizations around the world, I have noticed that efforts to serve more poor people can stumble on the very first step: seeing them. 

One experience in particular stands out from my work with a very well-meaning MFI whose staff claimed that there were not poorer clients or women to whom they could lend. In order to shed some light, I went out and interviewed people whom I thought were potential clients who were poorer than those currently served and took their pictures.  I also interviewed and photographed some people at a slightly higher economic level that I thought resembled the people they were currently serving.

At a staff meeting, I posted pictures around the room and asked staff members to choose the people whom they would approach about a loan.  Then, I shared the brief profiles of people interviewed and ask them to again choose.  After the selections were made and tallied, we matched profiles with pictures.  Many of the people who were chosen based on their profiles were not chosen based on their pictures, revealing an apparent disconnect between the intent to serve poorer clients and the ability to identify them visually. This reflection led to the development of specific strategies to target certain profiles of clients that had previously been overlooked.

For diverse reasons, the poorest members of society can become invisible to us.  Perhaps they are so omnipresent that we learn to look past them. Perhaps they are confined to their homes because of mobility problems.  In many cases, the poorest serve in roles in which culturally they are not typically acknowledged as 3-dimensional individuals. In some contexts, such as Latin America, being labeled poor has an element of moral judgment and is seen as synonymous with “lazy” or “dissolute”; therefore, the “poor” are not seen as likely or attractive customers. Whatever the reason, sometimes even well-meaning MFI field staff can be afflicted by this “blindness.”

What are some strategies that MFIs can use to help existing staff more successfully identify poor people who could benefit? The best pro-poor MFIs that I have seen have strong orientation programs that help staff to see the poor as human beings in all their complexity. One organization in the Philippines even sent new staff to live with a poor family for a few days to better understand their reality. While it may not be necessary to go to this extreme, structured, reflective interactions with some of the organization’s humblest businesses and families can go a long way toward bringing this population into focus for staff and helping them to see potential in those who were once invisible."

-Lisa Kuhn Frailoli

Lisa Kuhn Fraioli has over 12 years experience in microfinance and 16 in Latin America. She has provided technical assistance and training to microfinance organizations throughout Latin America with Freedom from Hunger, as well as worked as a gender and microfinance specialist for Opportunity International, specializing in product design and research. She is currently the Executive Director of the Foundation for Sustainable Development, which supports asset-based community development through capacity-building, small grants, and international volunteers and interns. Learn more about FSD's work here.

This article originally appeared on the Truelift blog.

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Creating Good Conversations to Deliver Impact

22/1/2015

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Picture
Anton Simanowitz

Yesterday I attended a presentation on the launch of B-Corps in the UK by James Perry and Charmian Love to the Impact for Breakfast Club meeting in London.

B-Corps is a global movement to redefine success in business. It models a new form of capitalism, whereby organisations are judged not just by their profits, but the difference they make to society. In this way, business becomes as a force for good in the world. B-Corps companies structure their legal form so that they are accountable to a broad set of stakeholders, and not just shareholders.

In order to be recognised as B-Corps, businesses must be certified in terms of governance, environment, working conditions, community and business model, which is an excellent start in terms of setting standards for good practice. This is done through self-assessment, followed by an external validation process.

But how do we make this more than just a tick-box exercise, and ensure that the process drives bottom-line improvements in what the organisation delivers for society as well as shareholders? I raised this question and was impressed by the answer that came back both from a B-Corps certified company and an investor in the meeting. The assessment gets staff, management and Board to think more holistically and gives space for conversations to start happening at different levels of an organisation. When this happens, and staff take time to reflect on what they are doing and why, their work stops being simply transactional, and they start to see how what they are doing links to the broader purpose. This also gives them permission to think outside the box, to question whether the way things are done to achieve intended results, and to come up with ideas on how to do things better.

The B-Corps assessment framework also creates a space for conversations between B-Corps companies and their investors, their customers, their suppliers.

Much of this resonates a particular chapter in our recently-launched The Business of Doing Good – Chapter 2: “Ask good questions: Have good conversations.” The key insight is this: just because we’re delivering well-designed products in the marketplace designed to create social value, doesn’t mean that it’s working, or that we can’t do it better. But cycles of learning and innovation depend on the ability of everyone in our organisations to connect with the “big picture” of what we’re doing and why, and to engage on a conversation on what we might improve next time around. Having a B-Corps assessment is a starting point to start making this conversation happen and the onus is on investors, board and management to ensure that this becomes a process of on-going learning and improvement.

Overall, it was a thought-provoking event, and I left feeling excited about the potential contribution that B-Corps stands to make in the world of business, and the world at large. I look forward to the official UK launch of B-Corps come September.

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    Katherine E. Knotts

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