Publications

State of the Field of Integrated Health and Microfinance in India, 2012

The Microcredit Summit Campaign, Freedom from Hunger, and the Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar released a new report in June 2012 titled Integrated Health and Microfinance in India: Harnessing the Strengths of Two Sectors to Improve Health and Alleviate Poverty. 

The report demonstrates how microfinance can be further leveraged to provide a powerful tool to address one of India's persistent barriers to the economic advancement of the poor: ill health caused by lack of access to health services.

Click here to download the report.

 

 

Financing Healthier Lives: Empowering Women Through Integration of Microfinance and Health Education

Click here to download the advocacy document produced by the Campaign in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

This update of an earlier edition again focuses on the power of integrating microfinance services with health education. It highlights efforts by the Microcredit Summit Campaign and UNFPA using a methodology developed by Freedom from Hunger. Included is analysis from innovative work in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Of special note are the results from a pilot project in India that shows how local capacity can effectively be built to accelerate the large-scale global adoption of integration.

The document provides evidence of the impact of microfinance projects. It also serves as a call to action for development agencies, governments, microfinance institutions and donors to invest in this strategy that holds the promise changing social norms and of making many of the MDG targets achievable.The final section offers eight concrete recommendations for action to realize the potential of the “combined services” approach of integrating microfinance services with health education. All eight actions rely on the development agencies, governments, micro-finance institutions and donors to promote integrated health education and microfinance as a means to meeting the MDGs.

Our Successful Pilot Project in India

In June 2008, the Microcredit Summit Campaign, in partnership with Freedom from Hunger and funded by Johnson & Johnson, completed a 15-month pilot project in Southern India.  The pilot covered the two Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andra Pradesh by working with four MFIs: Star Microfin Service Society (SMSS), People’s Multipurpose Development Society (PMDS), McLevy Institute of Development Services (MIDS), and Pioneer Trad.  Four local trainers were equipped to train one hundred of the MFIs field workers, who then delivered health lessons on HIV/AIDS, management of childhood illnesses, and women’s health to 15,657 credit group women.

The results of the project demonstrated that the weekly trainings resulted in an increase of life-saving health knowledge for the clients and their families.  It also showed that In-Country Trainers can be given the skills to train on additional health education topics so that they could market their product to existing partner MFIs with additional health topics to other MFIs interested in integration.  Finally, our pilot project showed that the project is self-sustainable because MFIs are willing and able to pay for trainings that expand their client services and improve clients’ health.

Global Expansion Project

Our goal for the Financing Healthier Lives Project is to globally expand a proven and innovative self-sustaining model of integration through the creation of a worldwide network of trainers initially reaching over half a million microfinance clients in eighteen countries with life-saving health education lessons. 

Our objectives at the completion of this global project are to:

1. Create a global group of social entrepreneurs capable of providing health education trainings to microfinance organizations in a sustainable manner after the project period.  
2. Reach over a half a million clients during the project period to show that supply of a quality health education training program is scalable.
3. Create a breakthrough in the microfinance marketplace by showing that integration of health education is financially sustainable for MFIs without continued donor support. 

With these objectives in mind, our project intends to produce the following outcomes:

• At least 540,000 microfinance clients (30,000 microfinance clients per country) reached with life-saving health information.
• 1,800 field workers (100 per country) trained. 
• Partnerships built with 90 MFIs (5 MFIs per country).
• 36 In-Country Health Education Trainers (2 trainers per country) trained.