Determinants of social outreach of microfinance institutions

Abstract

The paper analyzes the determinants of social outreach of microfinance institutions (MFIs), using three measures of outreach – depth of outreach, breadth of outreach, and outreach to women, and its possible complementarity with financial performance. We use an unbalanced panel of 1,219 MFIs over a period of 20 years to investigate the effect of firm-specific characteristics and the impact of prevailing legal system on social outreach of MFIs. Rejecting the notion of tradeoff between financial performance and social outreach, our empirical results show that better financial performance has a positive association with social outreach. Furthermore, we observe that a common law legal system is more conducive in facilitating social outreach, and MFIs operating under common law legal system achieve better depth of outreach, breadth of outreach, and outreach to women, than MFIs under code law legal system and mixed law legal system. While we had expected nonprofit MFIs to exhibit better social outreach than for profit MFIs, we found empirical evidence of such only in the case of outreach to women. Finally, we find empirical evidence that unregulated MFIs achieve better social outreach than regulated MFIs.