Project Overview

The State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report highlights the latest data on the progress towards reaching more than 175 million of the poorest families with microfinance and ensuring that 100 million of those families rise out of poverty. This report is the largest and most comprehensive annual survey on the outreach of microfinance to the poor and very poor.

Vulnerability, the 2013 Report

According to Vulnerability: The State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report, 2013, in 2011, 13 million fewer of the world’s poorest families received access to microcredit and other financial services than had in 2010. This marks the first time since 1998 when the Campaign began tracking this data that the total number of clients and the number of poorest families reached has declined. The total number of clients was reported to have fallen from 205 million to 195 million and the sub-set of families living in extreme poverty, defined as less than $1.25 a day, from 137 million to 124 million.

Most other parts of the world saw moderate or slowed growth, with the exception of 1.4 million new clients in Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this reverse in 2011, microfinance institutions still provided microloans to more than 124 million households living in extreme poverty. Assuming an average of five persons per family, this means that more than 621 million people were affected; this is twice the entire population of the United States.

In Vulnerability, we also examine how the microfinance community can improve the products and services to address the needs of those most vulnerable to poverty. The report argues that getting the industry back on track will require a new understanding of clients’ needs, preferences, and aspirations, as well as designing new tools for delivering products and services to them at lower costs.

In order to make the report more accessible, for the first time in the Campaign’s history the report will be presented through a companion website, bringing the printed page to life.

Read the report online at http://stateofthecampaign.org

The Microcredit Summit Campaign has collected data for the State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report since 1999 (except in 2009) and has verified that data for 10 of those years. The process consists of (1) the circulation of Institutional Action Plans (IAPs) to thousands of practitioners requesting their most recent data; (2) a phone campaign to the 400 largest MFIs in the world to encourage submission; (3) a verification process seeking third-party corroboration of the data submitted by the largest MFIs; (4) data compilation and analysis; and (5) the writing and publication of the report. This process has, for more than a decade, produced the largest primary-source collection of data from MFIs available.