News/Events

Heather Esper, WDI program manager for impact assessment, recently took part in a panel discussion focused on building a results and impact reporting framework for an inclusive distribution network at an Inter-American Development Bank SCALA event in Antigua, Guatemala.

Esper shared why it is important to measure the impact of inclusive business in a multidimensional way. This included discussion on the importance of assessing the impact of not only microdistributors, but also customers and the broader community, as well as the importance of moving beyond economic metrics. Esper was joined on the panel, moderated by Dora Moscoso of the IDB’s Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) by JD Bergeron, director of Truelift. Truelift is a trust mark — in microfinance and beyond — to signify commitment to positive and enduring change for people living in poverty.

“The panel stimulated a lot of discussion and interest across different stakeholders in capturing non-economic metrics,” Esper said. “SCALA’s next step is to potentially create a learning lab for collecting such metrics.”

The objectives of the two-day event were to share experiences in the development and scaling of inclusive distribution as well as strengthen the knowledge building capacity and social and economic impact of a broader network focused on inclusive distribution throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

SCALA is a groundbreaking MIF program that proposes a multi‐stakeholder approach where anchor companies, microfinance institutions, academia, and non-governmental organizations join efforts to scale innovative micro‐distribution networks based on microfranchising models to provide business opportunities and access to high quality products and services to the base of the pyramid.

MIF, a member of IDB, is funded by 39 donors and supports private sector-led development benefitting low-income populations and the poor, their businesses, farms, and households. The aim is to provide them with the tools to boost their incomes — access to markets and the skills to compete in those markets, access to finance, and access to basic services, including green technology. A core MIF mission is to act as a development laboratory, experimenting, pioneering, and taking risks to build and support successful micro- and small- and medium-size enterprise models.