The content below is not actively maintained and may be out of date. We last updated the content below in February 2010.

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ACCION International focuses on microfinance. It appears to engage in a variety of activities:1

Our investigations of ACCION International to date (details below) have not been able to answer what we consider key questions about an organization working in this area. These key questions include:

• What impact does ACCION International's technical assistance have on ACCION International's partner institutions (i.e., the banks it supports)?
• Is ACCION International's due diligence on partner institutions answering the following questions:
  • What are partner institutions' "true" repayment rates? (More on the "true" repayment rate on our blog)
  • What interest rates do partner institutions charge and how do these compare to other available interest rates?
  • How do partner institutions monitor clients' potential over-indebtedness? What steps do partners take to prevent potential intimidation of clients by loan officers?
  • What are partner institutions' dropout and retention rates? (More on the importance of dropout/retention rates on our blog)
  • What are partner institutions' methods for targeting the very poor, and can they demonstrate that they are successfully doing so?

Details of our evaluations

We have investigated ACCION at three times. ACCION applied for a grant in late 2009, we reviewed ACCION's website in mid-2009, and ACCION applied for a grant in late 2007. Details on each follow below.

2009 grant application

We reviewed ACCION International in late 2009 as part of our process to distribute $250,000 in grants to organizations working on economic empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Our review consisted of reviewing materials ACCION submitted in response to our questions and multiple phone conversations with a staff member.2

ACCION did not submit information that allowed us to answer the questions above.

ACCION did stand out from other U.S. microfinance institutions we considered in two ways:

• For its commitment to making reports on its partners freely available on its website.3 These publications include poverty reports for the clients of several of ACCION's partners in Latin America, showing that, in many cases, clients are poor, though not "extremely poor."4
• For sharing a document which details the (a) amount and (b) type of support they provide to each partner institution.5 While this document does not demonstrate impact, it does provide donors with more information about the role ACCION's services play for microfinance institutions than we have seen for any of the other similar organizations we evaluated.

Sources

• ACCION International. IRS 990 form (2007) (PDF).
• ACCION International. ACCION Partners. We do not have permission to publish this document.
• ACCION International. Insight #5: Poverty outreach findings: Mibanco, Peru.
• ACCION International. Insight #8: ACCION Poverty outreach findings: SOGESOL, Haiti.
• Brown, Marcia. ACCION Vice President, Resource Development. Phone call with GiveWell, September 16, 2009.
• Brown, Marcia. ACCION Vice President, Resource Development. Phone call with GiveWell, October 16, 2009.
• Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International. Resources. http://resources.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/ (accessed May 4, 2010). Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5pTpX25nk.
• GiveWell. Questions for microfinance charities.

Additional application materials

• ACCION International. Active clients. We do not have permission to publish this document.
• ACCION International. Data on ACCION International's MFI Partners. We do not have permission to publish this document.
• ACCION International. Historical statistics for selected ACCION partners. We do not have permission to publish this document.
• ACCION International. Looking back: Our story. We do not have permission to publish this document.

2009 website review

In mid-2009, we reviewed the ACCION International's website as part of a process to identify top international aid organizations. (How did we identify charities for review?) We reviewed ACCION International'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.)

ACCION International did not meet either of these criteria.

2007 grant application

ACCION International 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 ACCION International did not advance

We used the following principles in conducting our Round 1 screen for this cause:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

ACCION International 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 ACCION International 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, ACCION submitted the following documents:

• Document 1
• Document 2
• Document 3
• Document 4
• Document 5

Updated: March 5, 2010

• 1.

  ACCION International, "IRS 990 Form (2007)," Pg 3.

• 2.

  Marcia Brown, phone call with GiveWell, September 16, 2009.

  Marcia Brown, phone call with GiveWell, October 16, 2009.

• 3.

  Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International, "Resources."

• 4.

  See, for example:

  • ACCION International, "Insight #5: Poverty Outreach Findings: Mibanco, Peru," Pg 7. 0% of clients live on less than $1/day; 4% live on less than $2/day.
  • ACCION International, "Insight #8: ACCION Poverty Outreach Findings: SOGESOL, Haiti," Pg 6. 6% of clients live on less than $1/day; 50% on less than $2/day.
• 5.

  ACCION International, "ACCION Partners."