Number Of Active Clients Research Articles

FINANCIAL OUTREACH AND FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY OF LICENSED DEPOSIT TAKING MICROFINANCE INSTITUTIONS IN NAIROBI CITY COUNTY, KENYA

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between financial outreach and financial sustainability of deposit taking microfinance institutions in Nairobi County, Kenya.
 Methodology: The study employed a positivism research philosophy to determine the relationship between financial outreach and financial sustainability. A population of 13 licensed Deposit Taking Microfinance Institution was considered for this study. Census method was preferred due to small number of target population. A static Panel linear regression model with fixed effect was developed for both operating self-sufficiency and financial self-sufficiency. Secondary data was obtained from Central Bank of Kenya from audited financial statements. Inferential analysis method was employed using Stata statistics software then descriptive statistics tool such as mean and standard deviations were used. several diagnostic tests were conducted namely: normality, multicollinearity, heteroscedasticity, serial correlation, stationarity and Hausman.
 Results: The study found that number of active clients (breath of outreach) had statistically significant relationship; Average loan size (depth of outreach) had insignificant; age of firm (experience of institution) had insignificant relationship on financial sustainability of DTMFIs in Nairobi County, Kenya. The moderating effect between credit risk management (portfolio at risk) and breadth of outreach (number of active clients) was positive while portfolio at risk and experience of institution (age) and depth of outreach (average loan size) was negative on the relationship between financial outreach and (OSS and FSS) financial sustainability. Further, loan loss provision coverage had positive interaction with number of active clients, age, and average loan size on the relationship between financial outreach and financial sustainability of DTMFIs in Nairobi County, Kenya.
 Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: The study recommended that the government through Central Bank of Kenya should formulate policies that enhance savings with DTMFIs and therefore encourage financial inclusion. Further, DTMFIs should engage in vigorous financial education to boost financial facilities’ awareness to boost the breadth of outreach and get involved in information collection and sharing to mitigate credit risk.

Microfinance institution costs: effects of gender, subsidies and technology

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a statistical examination of the factors affecting the performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs) operating in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.Design/methodology/approachData on MFIs operating in Eastern Europe and Central Asia during the period 1999‐2004 were used in this study. A statistical analysis of the performance of these MFIs was conducted utilizing a cost function approach, which was estimated using seemingly unrelated regressions.FindingsDuring the study time period, MFIs involved in the provision of group loans and with a higher percentage of loans to women had lower costs. The presence of subsidies is also found to be associated with higher MFI costs.Social implicationsProviding financial services to women, and use of group loans was associated with lower costs in Eastern Europe and central Asian microfinance institutions in the early 2000s.Originality/valueThis study focuses exclusively on efficiency of MFIs operating in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and the first to explicitly measure outreach efficiency when output is measured by number of active clients, rather than the value of the overall MFI lending portfolio.

Inclusive Growth through MFIs' Outreach in Assam

Inclusive growth refers to ensuring that all the phases of development (designing, implementation, monitoring, evaluation) include the whole population of economy. The primary objective of this research is to illustrate and assess the role of microfinance outreach by MFIs towards bringing inclusive growth in Assam. Top 34 MFIs are selected based on their number of active clients. Primary data is collected from MFIs during June — October, 2010. The study concludes that the microfinance outreach by MFIs of Assam is growing at a faster pace of 38.51% in the last three years and also playing an important role in providing financial services to the poorer section of the society — not reached by the formal banking and other financial systems. The results of this study indicate that the aggregate outreach of the MFIs of Assam is 1.30% of the total population and 3.77% of the poor against the national outreach of 5%. Finally, the study concludes that the aggregate outreach rate of Assam is much lower than the national average, but given the policy environment growth in outreach by MFIs is satisfactory.

An experimental study of inter-cell interference effects on system performance in unplanned wireless LAN deployments

In this paper, we report on our experimental study of the effects of inter-cell interference on IEEE 802.11 performance. Due to growing use of wireless LANs (WLANs) in residential areas and settings supporting flash crowds, chaotic unplanned deployments are becoming the norm rather than an exception. Environments in which these WLANs are deployed, have many nearby access points and stations on the same channel, either due to lack of coordination or insufficient available channels. Thus, inter-cell interference is common but not well-understood. According to conventional wisdom, the efficiency of an IEEE 802.11 network is determined by the number of active clients. However, we find that with a typical TCP-dominant workload, cumulative system throughput is characterized by the number of actively interfering access points rather than the number of clients. We verify that due to TCP flow control, the number of backlogged stations in such a network equals twice the number of active access points. Thus, a single access point network proves very robust even with over one hundred clients, while multiple interfering access points lead to a significant increase in collisions that reduces throughput and affects media traffic. Only two congested interfering cells prevent high quality VoIP calls. Based on these findings, we suggest a practical contention window adaptation technique using information on the number of nearby access points rather than clients. We also point out the need for collision-resilient rate adaptation in such a setting. Together these techniques can largely recover the 50% loss in cumulative throughput in a setting with four strongly interfering access points.

On the Reduction of the Complexity of Realistic Large Scale Network Simulations

Summary Current computer systems allow a realistic simulation with more than 100,000 HTTP/TCP clients, as shown in this paper. However, the complexity of such simulations is high: the required memory and the simulation duration touches reasonable limits. Reducing the complexity by using a smaller number of clients as compared to reality is evaluated in this study. The reduction is performed with increasing the activity of each client keeping the load approx. constant. Further, it is shown that the average number of active clients remains approx. constant. The reduction has two targets: (i) the optimisation of the considered simulation scenario and (ii) to allow for simulations with larger simulation scenarios. It is evaluated how the reduction affects the following parameters: average traffic load, coefficient of variation, Hurst parameter, end-to-end delay and loss probability. It is shown that only the loss probability is affected by the reduction. The simulation results show that the required memory can be reduced by a factor of 4–8, depending on the error bound, and the simulation speed increased by up to 33%. The gain allows to simulate an equivalent of 1,200,000 instead of 150,000 clients.