Social Performance Assessment (SPA) for Lenders to Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME)

Building upon their existing Social Performance Assessment (SPA) Tool for Microfinance Institutions (MFI), Moody’s Analytics partnered with the SIPA Capstone team to develop an evaluation tool for calibrating the measurement of social performance in financial institutions lending to Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).

During the first phase of project, six main social performance factors, 44 sub-factors and 344 key performance indicators were identified to comprise a comprehensive and objective system for analysis. The team designed a questionnaire, which ranked the factors based on pair-wise comparisons, and circulated it among 15 market players.  

In phase two, the team built two excel-based questionnaires to assess market players’ opinions on appropriate individual weights for each factor, sub-factor and indicator. The list of interviewees included institutions, such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Women's World Bank and Triodos. The second questionnaire consisted of five question types, namely pair-wise comparison, importance assessment, relative importance, relative weighting and  numerical fill-in, to assess the importance the sub-factors and indicators relating to MSME lenders' practice from a social performance standpoint. 

By the end of the project, the team had collected six responses from the participants to the first questionnaire and three partial responses to the second questionnaire. After data collection and cleansing, the team used the analytical hierarchy process to conduct data analysis and utilized a consistency ratio to test the validity of data. For confidentiality concerns, only part of the project findings will be circulated among the key market players.