New approaches to measure the social performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs)

Outreach is a central purpose of microfinance institutions in providing access to quality financial services for large numbers of poor people. This paper critically reviews outreach indicators for microfinance institutions from prior research using a South Asian panel data set covering the period 1998 to 2013. We introduce two new ways of measuring the social objectives of MFIs, reflecting market shares, for breadth and depth of outreach. The results show that these new outreach indicators provide a better explanation of social performance of MFIs than those commonly used in prior research.