I'd be happy to, and thank you for the question.
I think this issue of over-indebtedness that you mentioned is an important one. One of the emerging best practices at the industry level is to bring in credit bureaus so that if a lender is lending to someone who is indebted to others, they can understand those levels and have certain self-regulatory guidelines.
That said, it isn't a cure-all. There has been a credit bureau in Peru since the late nineties, and yet there are pockets of over-indebtedness there. It's not the one solution.
Also, I think that these discussions of suicides by borrowers in India have been wildly exaggerated. In fact, the only serious studies of that have actually shown that the suicide rate—which is a tragedy if it happens even once—among microfinance clients seems to be much lower than among the general rural population in India. Also, for those who have suffered this tragedy, it is caused by many factors, not simply microfinance. It has become an important issue, but also one that has not always been correctly characterized based on hard data.
In relation to our tool, the progress out of poverty index that you mentioned, we felt it was very important to quantify the results of anything that is trying to attack poverty, because it's so easy to just talk about process and not about outcomes and results.
We joined with the Ford Foundation and an arm of the World Bank called CGAP, which I know Fonkoze has also worked with, to develop a very simple tool, a 10-question survey that's customized for every country based on census data. The census data are often hundreds of questions; we have statisticians who look at which of those questions are most highly correlated to someone's poverty level, and then which of them are easily observable in a household, so that the survey can be filled out accurately in 10 minutes or less. We've done that now for 46 countries in the world.
This tool is being used by both microfinance organizations and by many others attempting to deal with poverty reduction. They use it on intake when you take your first loan, and then this survey is filled out every year when you take a new loan. Then there are random audits of them so that the field force isn't changing the numbers to make things look better. It gives one a sense of the broad trends such as, first of all, if you are dealing with the hard-core poor to begin with, which is a question, and then whether they, on balance, are making progress towards and ultimately above the poverty line.
We've now seen more than 150 of the world's leading microfinance organizations take up this tool, and we're developing some online tools to help them get business intelligence, because this isn't about pointing the finger to say that you're not doing a good job—though there is some of that—but more to figure out, even within an organization, if you're doing a very effective poverty reduction job in one part of the country and less so in another. If so, why is that?
This type of transparency and insight into poverty reduction success is fairly new, but it's very easy and cost-effective to do through this tool and through some similar ones that are on the market.