Micro-finance: Chennai unit shows the way

The good thing about the increasing interest in micro-finance is that many practitioners are feeling the need for hard facts on impact assessment.

While disbursement figures earlier did not merit spends on research and surveys, big growths (albeit on a low base) in disbursements are making both micro-finance organisations and the banks that are lending to them (primarily private sector banks and foreign banks) look for ways to measure what their money is doing.

While India can learn from the micro-finance experiences of many developing countries, its size and the nationalised banking environment for years make such learning have limited significance.

On the other hand, the experiments in India, or the rapid strides we are taking in the area of micro-finance can be of tremendous interest to other countries. But in the micro-finance sector in India, the documentation of experiments and successes is of recent origin. But increasingly, bankers, donors, researchers are bringing about a change.

Earlier in the month I had an opportunity to visit the Centre for Micro-finance Research (CMFR), which is housed in Chennai's Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR). The centre has been funded by ICICI Bank, which, in keeping with its increasing stake in the sector, felt the need for such an institution.

What the CMFR hopes to do is to be the ground resource for researchers across the globe, studying relationships between financing the poor and its social impact. The advantage is that these researchers can use live data from any micro-finance organisation that ICICI Bank has funded.

Since ICICI Bank is already working with over 55 micro-finance organisations, researchers would have diverse projects and regions to choose from.

There is also a possibility that the research organisation that has its primary base in Africa, Microsave, and which has been trying to set up its India base for a while now, may also be housed at the IFMR and work specifically on capacity building for the entire sector. Microsave's years of experience, together with ICICI Bank's reach in India, should be able to ensure that this effort achieves all that it has set out to.

The kind of research projects the CMFR is working on gives an indication of the range.