Women's World Banking is a microfinance organization. We have currently de-prioritized the area of microfinance. We do not currently consider organizations in this category as potential top charities, unless we have a specific reason to consider them outstanding and unusual, for reasons outlined at our writeup on microfinance.
Women's World Banking (WWB) focuses on microfinance. Specifically, WWB provides technical assistance to microfinance institutions (i.e., microfinance banks which provide loans and savings) in the developing world.1
We have currently de-prioritized the area of microfinance. We do not currently consider organizations in this category as potential top charities, unless we have a specific reason to consider them outstanding and unusual, for reasons outlined at our writeup on microfinance.
We have investigated Women's World Banking in the past. Output from these investigations follows for those readers who are interested in it. It should not be taken as representative of our current views.
Updated: May 11, 2012
Past investigations of Women's World Banking (no longer up to date or representative of our views; included here only as a matter of historical interest)
We have investigated Women's World Banking at three times. WWB applied for a grant in late 2009, we reviewed WWB's website in mid-2009, and WWB applied for a grant in late 2007. Details on each follow below.
2009 grant application
We reviewed WWB in late 2009 as part of our process to distribute $250,000 in funds to an economic empowerment organization in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Our review consisted of reviewing materials WWB submitted in response to questions we provided and a phone conversation with a staff member.2
WWB did not submit information that allowed us to answer the questions above.
Sources
WWB requested that we keep all materials submitted as well as the documents' titles confidential.
2009 website review
In mid-2009, we reviewed the Women's World Banking's website as part of a process to identify top international aid organizations. (How did we identify charities for review?) We reviewed Women's World Banking's website to determine whether it met either of the following two criteria, which we believe indicate whether a charity is likely to eventually be able to meet our full criteria for a recommendation: (Why do we rely on information found on a charity's website?)
- Does the charity publish high-quality monitoring and evaluation reports on its website? A charity meets this criterion if it freely publishes - on its website - substantial evidence regarding impact that (a) discusses how the impacts of projects or programs were evaluated, including what information was collected and how it was collected; (b) discusses the actual impact of the evaluated projects. (Why is monitoring and evaluation so important?) We seek enough evidence to be confident that a charity changed lives for the better - not simply that it carried out its activities as intended. Different programs aim for different sorts of life change, and must be assessed on different terms. We do not hold to a single universal rule for determining what "impact" we're looking for; rather, what we look for varies by program type. (For more, see, What constitutes impact?)
- Does the charity stand out for program selection? A charity meets this criterion if it focuses primarily on (or publishes enough financial information to make it clear that 75% of its recent funding is devoted to) what we consider "priority programs." These programs have particularly strong evidence bases, enough to lower the burden of proof on a charity running them. (Why do we look for charities implementing proven programs?) Such programs include administering vaccinations, distributing insecticide-treated nets, and treating tuberculosis, among many others. (For more, see our full list of priority programs.)
Women's World Banking did not meet either of these criteria.
2007 grant application
Women's World Banking applied for our funding and recommendation for saving lives or reducing poverty in Africa, but did not advance past our Round 1 screen, which aimed at finding charities with strong self-documentation. For more information, see our overview page for this grant.
Specifics of why Women's World Banking did not advance
We used the following principles in conducting our Round 1 screen for this cause:
- Look for strong documentation that lives have been changed for the better. One of the challenges of this cause is that it involves trying to help people who are far away and from very different cultures than our own; the fact that a charity's described activities seem to make logical sense isn't enough, by itself, to convince us that positive change has occurred.
- Look for a sense of how many lives have been changed (and how they've been changed) by an organization's activities. A sense of how many lives are changed "per dollar" is essential to decide between logical but different approaches, so we focused on the applicants that seemed most likely to be able to provide this sense.
- Aim for a complete or near-complete understanding of applicants' activities. Our Round 1 application asked applicants to feature a single program, but we also took the size and scope of the organization into account: a large, comprehensive organization needs extremely strong documentation in order to give any sense of its activities and effects, whereas an organization with a simpler and more cohesive model might be evaluated with less documentation.
Women's World Banking was among the charities that did not provide this type of evidence and instead submitted evidence that gave descriptions of their activities relying on one or more of the following: anecdotes, newspaper articles, survey data (types of evidence that we are skeptical about, as we have written on our blog), and evidence of the size of the problems they were attacking - but did not give us information that gave us high confidence that their programs were creating positive life change, or information that we felt could begin to get at their cost-effectiveness in changing lives. It's possible that Women's World Banking has the information we want, and didn't send it due to misinterpretations of our application, time constraints, or other reasons. But due to time constraints of our own, we opted to focus on the applicants who seemed most promising.
As part of that application process, Women's World Banking submitted the following documents:
- 1.
"The WWB network is supported by a global team that works closely with our member institutions to develop innovative business strategies, strengthen their organizations, and create products that best meet the needs of the poor in the communities they serve. Based in New York City, WWB's global team consists of 40 microfinance professionals who deliver expertise in serving the women's market through product design and distribution, access to capital markets, organizational effectiveness, and peer-to-peer learning." WWB organization website. See http://www.swwb.org/about, accessed 1/12/10.
- 2.
Phone conversation with Stephanie Waxman, WWB Associate, Global Resources & Communications, 9/28/09.
