Impact Assessment of the PULSE microfinance programme in Lusaka, Zambia.

Our thanks go particularly to Diana Banda, the second member of the qualitative enquiry team, and to members of the main survey team: Peggy Muyangana, Agatha Wanchinga, Mary Nyasulu, Tadeyo Lungu, Mutunda Nyambe and Thole Chizaso. Special thanks are also due to members of staff of PULSE, both in the main office (especially Mike Mbulo, Ezra Anyano) and in the branches. Finally, and most important we are grateful to the many respondents who gave up time to answer so many questions. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS Background 1. PULSE is a group-based microfinance programme that provides savings and loan facilities to people living in low income compounds of Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. It was launched by CARE International in 1995 with initial support from Canada, and thereafter from the UK Department For International Development (DFID). By the end of June 1998 it had mobilised savings of nearly Kw.3 billion (£100,000) into Loan Insurance Funds (LIFs). It had advanced loans to 4,235 people and had 2,640 active participants, 63 % of them women. First loans ranged in value from Kw.50,000 to Kw.500,000 (£17 to £170), repayable over 25 weeks with interest at a rate of 40

Disclosing the Loan officer's role in microfinance development

The financial exclusion of the developing country poor requires radically enterprising solutions. Hence microfinance originally aspired to intermediate through unique double bottom line initiatives which would supply more appropriate credit, then other ‘financial services’, in an essentially participatory, bottom-up way. This would simultaneously support local small scale economic activity while enhancing well-being and social/gender justice. However the frontline local officers originally recruited into microfinance institutions to help ‘empower’ the poor towards this end later adopted unexpectedly different roles. Using original data from Zambia this paper examines how this occurred in a frontier field situation. Here loan officers performed multiple, ambiguous, and changeable roles while their home institution first sought to decouple, and then prioritized its own immediate survival over its other founding aspirations. As they acted more like ‘loan repayment agents’ and ‘debt collectors’ than genuinely participative ‘facilitators’ supporting the poor, further, unintended consequences resulted. Any further decoupling and retreat from committed double bottom line working could bear heavily upon microfinance’s further/future development prospects