Impact of Microfinance on the Social Performance of Local Households: Evidence from the Kassena Nankana East District of Ghana

This study examines the impact of microfinance on the social performance of local households in the Kassena Nankana East District of northern Ghana. The study's primary objective was to measure the average effect of the common social performance framework's core indicators (outreach and products and services) on beneficiaries. Because the social performance management framework is an institutional-based evaluation, it is silent on changes in the service users' lives. This study modified the common social performance management framework to treat outreach and products and services as independent variables, with changes in the lives of service users as the only output or result. We narrowed these indicators to outreach and mobile banking, and under products and services, we concentrated on nonfinancial products and services because, in microfinance, nonfinancial services lack the needed attention. This study employed the propensity score matching (PSM) method to measure the average treatment effect of the independent variables (outreach, mobile banking, and training) by using data from 341 client households. In the absence of a random assignment of treatment conditions, we placed client households who received these three treatments in a treatment group and those who did not receive such treatments in a control group. We further used the PSM method to match observations of households in the treatment group (households who have access to mobile banks, MFI outreach, and training) with those in the control group (households without access to those) by creating the conditions of an experiment where the treatment elements are randomly assigned to avoid any possible bias. The results showed that outreach significantly decreased loan disbursement time. Conversely, outreach was not significant in relation to delayed loan disbursement time. Mobile banking was statistically significant for increased income, business expansion, timely loan disbursement, and high cost of loans. On the contrary, mobile banking was significantly negative in relation to delayed loan disbursement time. Training showed a significant correlation with women's empowerment, household decision making, and political and community participation. Regarding the impact of training on the use of a loan, the value of loans for consumption was negative, whereas for production it was positive. Despite the general acceptance of the common framework to measure microfinance social performance, there is still little work to prove the relationship between the framework's output variables and changes in the lives of the service users. This paper is the first to provide empirical evidence on the impact of outreach and training on change variables. The implication of this paper is that nonfinancial services are equally crucial to delivering change for microfinance service users. Therefore, policymakers must find ways to incorporate essential nonfinancial products and services as bundle packages with credit. Additionally, mobile banking has a high potential for addressing challenges with remote outreach and adverse selection, which is a primary obstacle preventing many poor people from accessing credit.