Preparing for my return to Malawi

It’s all go as we sort out the plans for my 5 week visit to Malawi in November. We’ve got lots to cover including checking the progress of the Progress out of Poverty Index roll out and completing the training of the final branch in the Central Region; talking to our star trainers about the detail of how we’re going to structure our redeveloped training approach and what delivery methods (like songs, dancing, games, etc) we’re going to use; and facilitating workshops with all our Loan Offers across the 3 regions of the country.

The workshops are a really exciting opportunity to meet with the people – our Loan Officers – who work at the front line with our clients and know them the very best. They’ve been kept up to date with all the Social Performance Management work we’ve been doing and have started making changes to the way they work, but now’s we’re taking the time to meet with them all personally. We’ll cover important issues including helping clients to appraise the appropriateness of each other’s loan sizes, ensuring that clients save regularly and don’t just dump in a large sum right before disbursement (which wouldn’t therefore be representative of their cash flow and probably means they have borrowed the money), empowering the clients to problem solve within the group, and so on. We’ll be using interactive approaches – like role play – to make the messages fun and help our staff to remember them.

The operations team have also been hard at work piloting some new products, one of which is a small loan aimed at the poorest clients which doesn’t require them to have any savings as a deposit and has a maximum loan size of K5,000 (just over £20). The other is in response to clients telling us they don’t like the fortnightly repayments: we’re therefore trialling a 3-weekly repayment product aimed at those clients who have already demonstrated their capabilities, and are ready to move to slightly bigger loans than our average standard loan sizes, of between K30,000-K60,000 (around £125-£250). So whilst I’m in Malawi it’s a good opportunity to see how these pilots are progressing, talk to the branch staff about any technical difficulties and to the women about how they’re finding the products. It’s still very early days, but important to catch any potential problems as early on as possible.

Poverty assessment rolled out in Central Region

I am happy to report that we are now ready – following lots of field testing and piloting to make sure all the processes are easily operationalized and results are accurate – to roll out the Progress out of Poverty tool (PPI) in the Central Region of Malawi. It’s an exciting next step in the Social Performance Management (SPM) work, as it means we’ll be able to gather data on clients’ poverty levels at entry, during the course of their time with MicroLoan and at exit. We’ll therefore be able to see the poverty levels of the clients we’re reaching and the changes to their poverty status.

Chiko, the SPM officer based in Kasungu, has been in the field the last couple of weeks training the Loan Officers at branches in how to carry out the PPI. They’re given classroom training and lots of hands-on experience in the field to test their new skills.

Muzungu nowhere near Kasungu

Despite now being back in slightly more chilly and grey England, the Social Performance Management work we're doing continues unabated. Chikonzero (or Chiko to his friends and colleagues) is working incredibly hard on all sorts of projects: making sure that the Progress out of Poverty Index (measuring clients’ poverty likelihood) pre-implementation work is going well and preparing for roll out across the Central Region, putting in place pilots testing new products aimed at reaching the most poorest and providing a longer repayment period to fit in with clients’ business schedules, documenting MicroLoan’s training best practice…etc.

Training in practice

On the subject of training, we’re going to be integrating a different training methodology for our clients. Loan Officers will be taught to use the ‘adult learning approach’, which is designed to help clients with limited formal education to learn more effectively. Before that can happen though Chiko’s been speaking to our star training Branch Managers and observing them at work training the groups. We’ll pull together all the best bits from our current in-house training as well as looking at the way other organisations across the globe do their training to develop a new and improved training programme, helping our clients to become even more effective businesswomen. We’re hoping that we can start piloting this very early in the new year.

Above is a picture of one of our Branch Managers working with a group. One of the exercises he has developed which highlights that clients need to know each other well before forming a group is to ask each woman to add a chitenje (cloth worn as a skirt) to a pile. Each potential client has to then give one chitenje back to another potential client, demonstrating that they know each other and recognise each other’s possessions. These kinds of practical exercises are part of the adult learning approach and ensure that lessons are more easily understood and remembered by clients.