CARIB-CAP: PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENTS

A Performance Assessment is an appraisal of your organization. It may be used internally to improve the performance of the institution or to attract funders (of microfinance programmes). Funders may be local or foreign investors who are interested in learning more about your organization and whether or not it is a viable business.

Performance assessments will help your microfinance institution (MFI) to identify its strengths and weaknesses.

The assessment will help to benchmark your Organization's performance against that of similar organizations in the region, as well as institutions in Latin America and other parts of the world. It will also assist in encouraging transparency in Caribbean micro finance.

The assessments will include the following information:

• Overview - vision, mission, and organizational strengths and weaknesses;
• Institution - ownership, management, organization, structure, human resources management information and communication technology, internal controls, auditing, availability of information, business planning and regulation and supervision;
• Products - savings, lending other financial and non-financial;
• Loan portfolio quality - credit regulations, how the loan portfolio quality is measured, how it is monitored, how it is managed including delinquency and write-offs, portfolio statistics, reviews and comparisons with financial statements and analysis of statistics;
• Financial performance and risk management; and
• Outreach to low-income clients.

If a PA is conducted for your institution, your Institution will be eligible to participate in the Capacity Building Plan activity of the CARIB CAP Project.

Your organization will be asked to provide the following information:

• The current organizational chart - including vacancies;
• Organizational policies and procedures manuals, instructions, and descriptions, including loan policies and procedures, loan loss provisioning and write-off policies, and descriptions of financial and non financial services;
• Audited financial statements for the last 2-3 years;
• A year-to-date financial statement for the current fiscal year, if more than one quarter has elapsed since the last audited financial statement;
• One complete set of summary reports from the loan tracking system, including portfolio-at-risk information on a product-by-product basis;
• Any other evaluation or impact study that has been done on the institution;
• Minutes of the most recent Board Meeting;
• Other information you think will be useful to the analyst.

Eligibility Criteria:

• The MFI must demonstrate at least one year of operation;
• If a NGO, demonstrate that the microfinance portfolio represents at least 50% of the total portfolio;
• If a Co-operative Credit Union (CCU), demonstrate that it has a microenterprise/microfinance portfolio within the CCU, with at least 500 clients and that it can separate the microfinance project from the main CCU portfolio for analysis;
• Audited financial statements, or a clear the commitment from the Boards of beneficiary MFIs to external auditing beginning in the current fiscal year;
• Portfolio of at least US$400,000, net of government or other type of donor tied resources;
• The MFI should be willing to share information about its performance, specifically, the MFI should commit to send its information to the MIX;
• Demonstrate willingness to commit to an ex-post evaluation;
• The microfinance/microcredit project should be financially and operatively independent from other activities the institution might have; and
• The MFI must provide counterpart of at least 10% of the cost of the performance assessment and the CBP in cash.