PPI Blog

William Neuheisel's picture
William Neuheisel
• 05/18/16
• 0 Comments

The PPI is derived from a country’s national household income or expenditure survey (for more on this, watch the short video: The PPI Development Process). These household surveys are conducted periodically, typically every 5 years. When new survey data is released, the PPI for that country should be updated as well to keep it as accurate as possible. The process for updating a PPI is similar to the process for creating a new PPI. Once a PPI has been updated, it is released on the PPI website.

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Bobbi Gray's picture
Bobbi Gray
• 02/16/16
• Posted in lean data, data analysis
• 0 Comments

Cross-posted from Microcredit Summit Campaign

When I joined Freedom from Hunger several years back, I had the responsibility to carry on a decades-long commitment to research and evaluation. My predecessor, Barbara MkNelly, as well as my then-supervisor and president of Freedom from Hunger, Christopher Dunford, were already known for their contributions to the research efforts of the growing microfinance sector and the original set of SEEP/AIMS client assessment tools. Freedom from Hunger’s commitment to promoting easy-to-use and cost-effective tools also led to years of developing monitoring and evaluation systems for microfinance organizations that were coined as “Progress Tracking.” Fast-forward several years, and this is much better known as Social Performance Management.

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Julie Peachey's picture
Julie Peachey
• 01/07/16
• Posted in poverty lines
• 0 Comments

As many of you have heard, the World Bank updated the international poverty line from $1.25/day based on 2005 PPP to $1.90/day based on 2011 PPP.  This new poverty line reflects changes in purchasing power parity (PPP) [involving a substantial re-assessment of purchasing powers around the world] and prices between 2005 and 2011.

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Anonymous's picture
• 12/01/15
• 0 Comments

This is the seventh post in a series by Grameen Foundation on what it takes for institutions that provide microfinance services to go digital.

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Sharada Ramanathan's picture
Sharada Ramanathan
• 10/05/15
• Posted in Data Collection
• 2 Comments

In this age of ‘lean data’, organizations are seeking ways to reduce the data collection burden and cost in order to get meaningful, actionable data about their clients. Practitioners value the PPI for its statistical rigor, relatively low implementation cost, simplicity and transparency… the PPI is ‘lean data’. The national surveys upon which the PPI is based are conducted by enumerators in respondents’ homes, so the PPI is most accurate when it replicates that and the survey is done in-person and at-home. However, it can become expensive and time-consuming to administer the PPI if regular visits to a client’s home are not already built into an organization’s business model.

Given the trend to explore leaner ways to collect impact data, including PPI data, we wanted to test alternative interview methods that could potentially be less expensive, faster, and make it easier for organizations to administer the PPI. With funding from the Ford Foundation, Grameen Foundation worked with Mark Schreiner, developer of the PPI, to test the accuracy of alternative methods...

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William Neuheisel's picture
William Neuheisel
• 10/01/15
• Posted in Change over Time
• 0 Comments

Rigorously tracking changes in poverty over time is perhaps not the easiest aspect of social performance management, but we are seeing more and more PPI users begin to tackle it. We believe this trend can’t come soon enough, given the recent questions around whether MFIs and other social businesses are doing enough to measure and maximize their impact.

So we met recently with our friends at VisionFund International to learn how they are solving the challenges of tracking change in client poverty estimates over time.

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Anne Hastings's picture
Anne Hastings
• 09/14/15
• 0 Comments

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.

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Julie Peachey's picture
Julie Peachey
• 07/02/15
• 0 Comments

As the Progress out of Poverty Index® (PPI®) grows – both in scale and across more diverse users – the Grameen Foundation and Mark Schreiner are focused on developing a sustainable model that current and future users can rely on, well into the future.

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William Neuheisel's picture
William Neuheisel
• 06/08/15
• 0 Comments

Operating in Bangladesh since 2003, Katalyst is one of the oldest and largest pro-poor market development projects in the world. In its first five years, Katalyst proved itself as a high-impact program, generating widespread job growth and increased income for farmers. In 2008 however, an organizational strategy review identified a major area for improvement: Katalyst wasn’t sure how accurately it was targeting its interventions toward people living in poverty.

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Frank Ballard's picture
Frank Ballard
• 04/27/15
• 0 Comments

One child in ten thousand in Sub-Saharan Africa is blind due to cataracts. In developed countries, cataract blindness is a very treatable condition. However, in Malawi, despite efforts to offer free cataract surgery to children in need, at least a third of cataract blind children identified at outreach clinics do not seek surgery within three months of being identified. Uptake of this free medical service remains concerning. There were a number of reasons identified by researchers for this problem:

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