The Asian Development Bank (ADB) commissioned MSC to implement the Microfinance Expansion Project (MEP) in Papua New Guinea. Under this project, MSC collaborated with women’s community groups to develop linkages with MFIs, women’s banks, and women and faith-based groups. The aim was to promote gender issues at the provincial, district, and local levels.
MSC designed women-focused financial products, gender policies, and conducted workshops with partner financial institutions. Women were the central focus in the design and delivery of every financial education retail training and training-of-trainers. MSC drafted the first-of-its-kind gender policy for use by the partner financial institutions in the country. A key contribution of the MEP was the establishment of the Centre for Excellence in Financial Inclusion (CEFI), which has a particular focus on women and aims to achieve financial inclusion.
The project trained over 150,000 people—with women comprising 47% of the clients trained in financial education and 67% of the clients trained in business development services.
MSC and Tremolet Consulting worked with a group of 30 pit-emptying enterprises in Dar es Salaam, under UKAid’s SHARE program. MSC assessed the market, identified business opportunities, and developed management and training manuals for sanitation enterprises. The enterprises trained by MSC accessed working capital from local banks and MFIs, including KCB Tanzania, K-finance, Eclof Tanzania, Tujijenge Tanzania, and local WASH NGOs to purchase new sanitation equipment and thus improve access to decentralized sewerage systems.
By the end of 2017, these enterprises had accessed more than USD 100,000 in working capital loans and had expanded their services to at least three peri-urban areas around Dar es Salaam, including slums in Temeke and Ilala districts. One enterprise realized a 58% growth in annual gross income upon the purchase of new equipment to replace old equipment that WaterAid had initially donated or subsidized.
The success of the pit-emptying enterprises triggered market competition and price reduction from USD 20 to about USD 15.
Development of toolkits to enable financial institutions in lending for WASH needs of their clients in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Water.org hired MSC to scale up its WaterCredit concept to develop toolkits to help banks, MFIs, and NGOs to build their WASH finance portfolios. WaterCredit is an innovative concept that Water.org promotes in the developing world. It provides financial and technical assistance to its microfinance partners to develop loan products for the WASH needs of underserved households.
MSC developed a series of five toolkits to help WASH participants identify opportunities for WASH finance, develop WASH finance products, market their WASH finance product, develop delivery systems, and manage WASH portfolios. Partners of Water.org have used these toolkits extensively across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
WaterCredit has benefitted more than 12 million families in accessing water and sanitation facilities across 12 countries. In Africa alone, more than 10 banks and MFIs have used these products. One hundred and fifty bank managers in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania have received training on the application of the toolkits. Water.org reported in 2017 that WaterCredit has catalyzed USD 1.5 billion in commercial finance to the WASH sector.
MSC assessed the market for Water.org’s WaterCredit offering in central and south India. The assessment highlighted the demand and uptake of existing WaterCredit programs and analyzed the existing capacity of microfinance players in offering water credit.
This assessment helped Water.org to expand its partner base for water credit initiatives in India. At the time of writing, Water.org had 21 microfinance partners in India through which it had reached more than 7 million people across 12 states.
At the end of a three-year project on WASH loans, Friends of Women World Banking (FWWB) India contracted MSC to conduct an impact evaluation of its WASH loan portfolio. The WASH loan project involved the microfinance institutions (MFIs) ESAF and Grameen Koota (now CreditAccess Grameen) that received funding from FWWB. These MFIs were tasked to develop and offer water and sanitation loan (WASH) products to their customers. The loans were designed to finance the building of toilets and to facilitate water connections from public utilities.
MSC was engaged to conduct the impact evaluation in the cities of Nagpur and Bangalore. The objective was to understand the key success factors to run a WASH loan program sustainably, as well as the nature of challenges and issues that microfinance institutions faced in implementing such programs. MSC conducted two rounds of evaluation and recommended changes to the product features and product communication strategy to help ESAF and Grameen Koota improve the loan products and to scale them.
Based on this work, FWWB supported 370 institutions that disbursed more than 45,000 toilet loans. The FWWB project has had an impact on over 1 million women across 17 states in India.
MSC works with governments to implement large-scale programs. We provide strategic support by establishing technical support units and project management units. Our ground-level support provides the initial momentum for the respective programs and establishes their governance structure.
A key project in this context has been Pathways to Enhancing Financial Inclusion (PEFI) project in aspirational district. PEFI was established to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by supporting NITI-Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India), the policy think tank of the Indian government.
At the time of writing, MSC had been working to enhance the status of six selected indicators of financial inclusion in 27 aspirational districts. These districts had a cumulative population of 44 million people, spread across eight states in India. The project involved stationing financial inclusion coordinators in each district to work alongside the existing government and banking machinery to support, develop, and customize models of financial inclusion.
The project addresses four key issues:
- Improving the reach and performance of agent networks.
- Use of self-help groups (SHGs) to promote digital financial inclusion.
- Improving uptake and usage by women.
- Delivering effective financial education.