ACCION Poverty Outreach Findings & Analysis: BancoSol, Bolivia

Measuring the poverty profile of BancaSol clients

This paper, through a study, examines the poverty outreach of BancoSol, ACCION's partner in Bolivia. The purpose of the study is to inform BancoSol management of the distribution of poverty within their client population, as well as the client characteristics.

The paper is divided into the following six sections:

Section 1: Discusses the background of Bolivia and BancoSol.

Section 2: Discusses the main data sources used by ACCION, which include:

Loan evaluation data collected by BancoSol;
Publicly accessible data collected from the Inter-American Development Bank;
Household surveys on income and expenditure.

Section 3: Highlights that the relative poverty of Bolivia's general population is higher when compared to the poverty levels of urban Bolivians who make up BancoSol's clientele.

Section 4: Finds that the strongest predictors of expenditure per capita are household-size, sex, education level, geographic location and level of microenterprise fixed assets.

Section 5: Compares the loan evaluation data and household survey data for the same client population. It further states that:

Loan evaluation data for household income and expenditure is much lower than income and expenditure data from the household surveys;
The two data sources differ because of disparities in definitions of variables collected, focus and collection processes.

Section 6: Presents a tool, the Social Scorecard, which enables BancoSol management to monitor the poverty distribution of its clients over time.