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Healthy, Wealthy and Wise: How Microfinance Institutions Can Track the Health of Clients

For microfinance institutions (MFIs) with social missions, understanding changes in client well-being has become more important as MFIs are held to task to demonstrate both outreach to the poor and improvements in their lives. The Health Outcome Performance Indicators (HOPI) Project Report, published in 2015 has three primary goals: 1) to share experiences in selecting and pilot-testing a minimal set of health indicators among four MFIs, 2) to help MFIs choose among a set of tested indicators for monitoring client health outcomes over time, and 3) to summarize key recommendations for developing “standardized” client outcome monitoring indicators.

In 2016, Freedom from Hunger and the Microcredit Summit Campaign, as a follow-on to the HOPI Project Report, designed the Client Outcome Performance (COPE) Indicators Database to facilitate data collection and analysis of the health outcome performance indicators. The COPE Indicators database provides a pre-filled set of tested health indicators that MFIs can use to track both the poverty and health behaviors and outcomes of clients that are most relevant to financial service providers.

The COPE database:

Compiles clients' poverty levels using the Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI) developed by the Grameen Foundation and other user-defined data collected through a survey Provides a general analysis as well as a detailed analysis of the possible correlations between indicators.

COPE Instructions COPE Tool COPE Example database COPE Example Presentation of Results