Social Performance Country Report
This report details the state of SPM practice among network members in key operational and strategic areas. It is based on self-reported SPI4 data (verified by networks), and discusses both successes and challenges alike. This report was developed with the support of the Social Performance Fund, financed by the Ford Foundation and managed by the Microfinance Centre.
This case presents the experience of the Union of Credit Organizations of Republic of Armenia (UCORA) and its work with the MFC Social Performance Start-up Fund project, which aimed to support members to manage and report on their social performance. UCORA is a voluntary union of 12 credit organizations with a combined portfolio of around $1.35 million, representing 20% of the total microfinance market. Armenian MFIs are present in all regions of Armenia, — even remote, mountainous and rural regions.
UCORA’s mission is to foster the development of the Armenian financial system through a more efficient and potentially widespread outreach of credit organizations. It achieves this through representing the sector (to the Central Bank, social investors and professional associations), capacity building, member coordination and advocacy.
The report summarizes the status and key results of UCORA's membership in terms of its social performance, reaching targeted clientele, scope of products and client loyalty aspects, as well as a snapshot of compliance with client protection principles and responsible finance. The report does not claim to be a result of academic research. It is a first attempt in Armenia, and there are still a very few similar reports produced by microfinance networks in Europe and Central Asia, as well as globally. The scope of this report is based on specifics of social intentions of Armenian organizations, which drove its content. Many quantitative results are also presented, despite difficulties of data collection, comparability and consolidation.
Unlike the financial performance, where results are usually tracked with use of commonly accepted indicators and commonly understood ratios, the social performance indicators and standards are still new and not widely implemented. In addition, social results of various institutions are not comparable as are the financial results. The UCORA overcome these challenges by pre-designing a specific reporting format with indicators which could have been uniformly extracted from the databases of member organizations. Members submitted their statistical data, which then was consolidated and analysed. There are also qualitative findings in this report, based on information from open sources, web-sites, MIX Market, as well as institutional self-assessments and other reports.