Marie Michael Library

Overcoming the obstacles of identifying the poorest families: using Participatory Wealth Ranking (PWR), The CASHPOR House Index (CHI) ... to identify and encourage the participation of the poorest families, especially the women of those families

Simanowitz, Anton; Nkuna, Ben; Kasim, Sukor

The 1997 Microcredit Summit declared as its goal to reach "100 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by 2005." This is a bold objective, since reaching the poorest families through microfinance is still in its infancy, and most microfinance institutions (MFIs) currently reach the poor, not the poorest. This paper is about the first step in this objective: identifying the poorest clients. It is a step mostly avoided or forgotten in the clamor to open up programs that can start dispersing loans, and lose no time in reaching financial self-sufficiency.