Client Outreach

What do we mean by client outreach?

Outreach in general refers to the clients that you serve, which can be split by their characteristics. Depending on your organisational mission and goals, the outreach indicators that you capture may differ slightly, however core indicators for most MFIs will be the same. Some examples of core indicators include:

Poverty/income levels
Gender
Rural/urban
Targeted minority
Financially excluded clients

Why collect information on client outreach?

Collecting information on client outreach is vital in understanding whether you are reaching your target clients and formulating strategies to better serve target clients.

Other Outreach Indicators

Outreach indicators in general should be collected on an ongoing basis from all clients (census), and this should be embedded into business as usual processes.

You will therefore need to:

Add data collection to other client touch points such as client membership forms and loan application forms.
Train staff on collecting data accurately and efficiently
Modify data verification and auditing where necessary
Train staff on data verification and audit
Revise data management and analysis processes
Train staff on data management and analysis
Plan and revise reporting processes

Client Outreach Tools

Opportunity International partners use the Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI) to assess the likelihood that households are living below the poverty line. The PPI has been developed by the Grameen Foundation as a statistically-sound and simple to use tool. The tool uses 10 country-specific questions regarding household characteristics and asset ownership that are used to compute the likelihood that a household is living below the poverty line.

Please use the link above to access all available PPI Tools