Microcredit Summit Campaign Announces Newest Commitment: Grameen Foundation To Advance The Practice Of Poverty Measurement Through The Progress Out Of Poverty Index® (PPI®)
Washington, D.C., March 25, 2014 – The Microcredit Summit Campaign welcomes Grameen Foundation as the newest Campaign Commitment member, joining a global coalition of organizations committed to specific, measurable, and time-bound actions to advance the Campaign’s goal of helping 100 million families lift themselves out of extreme poverty.
“Grameen Foundation is pleased to announce our Campaign Commitment as our part in the global movement to ending extreme poverty,” stated Alex Counts, president & CEO of Grameen Foundation. “Our Commitment focuses on widely sharing the value that can be gained from using the Progress out of Poverty Index® and is driven by our conviction that to end poverty we must measure it and use that data to manage our progress. We see this Campaign Commitment a concrete step to move that agenda forward and to help us all stay accountable to ourselves and each other for achieving the goals we set.”
The Progress out of Poverty Index® (PPI®) is a poverty measurement tool for organizations and businesses with a mission to service the poor. The PPI is a 10-question survey about a household’s characteristics that is a statistically reliable, easy-to-use tool. With the PPI, an organization can successfully measure its poverty outreach, assess the performance of an intervention on the lives of the poor, and track poverty levels over time. The PPI is an important contribution to microfinance and any organization serving the poor for its simplicity and budget-friendly implementation.
In 2014, Grameen Foundation plans to look deeper into the uses of the PPI by organizations and distribute their findings so that others may glean lessons that help improve its use. By helping the microfinance industry better measure and track its poverty outreach, Grameen Foundation makes an important contribution to the goal of helping 100 million families lift themselves out of extreme poverty.
Grameen Foundation has announced its Campaign Commitment as follows:
- Grameen Foundation will release in 2014 a Global Use Report on the PPI outlining those known users of the PPI to date to broaden understanding about the types of organizations utilizing the PPI and the purposes to which they have put the tool.
- Grameen Foundation will also publish by the end of 2014 one or more case studies deeply investigating the benefits, challenges, and outcomes seen by organizations that are using the PPI.
- Grameen Foundation India with support from DFID will produce by the end of 2014 four Poverty Outreach Reports detailing use and trends in social performance that can be derived from data gathered using the PPI from Indian practitioners.
The Campaign looks forward to welcoming this new partner in the global coalition and sharing their progress towards the Commitment achievement at the 17th Microcredit Summit.
Read the Grameen Foundation Commitment letter.
For more information on Commitments and the 100 Million Project, visit www.microcreditsummit.org or write to mycommitment [at] microcreditsummit.org