Water and sanitation loan assessment for FWWB clients in India

• Nov 1, 2018
• 1 min

Friends of Women World Banking (FWWB) India contracted MSC to evaluate its WASH loan portfolio after the conclusion of a project on WASH loans. The loans would finance the construction of toilets and facilitate water connections from public utilities. MSC’s work enabled FWWB to support 370 institutions that disbursed more than 45,000 toilet loans.

At the end of a three-year project on WASH loans, Friends of Women World Banking (FWWB) India contracted MSC to conduct an impact evaluation of its WASH loan portfolio. The WASH loan project involved the microfinance institutions (MFIs) ESAF and Grameen Koota (now CreditAccess Grameen) that received funding from FWWB. These MFIs were tasked to develop and offer water and sanitation loan (WASH) products to their customers. The loans were designed to finance the building of toilets and to facilitate water connections from public utilities.

MSC was engaged to conduct the impact evaluation in the cities of Nagpur and Bangalore. The objective was to understand the key success factors to run a WASH loan program sustainably, as well as the nature of challenges and issues that microfinance institutions faced in implementing such programs. MSC conducted two rounds of evaluation and recommended changes to the product features and product communication strategy to help ESAF and Grameen Koota improve the loan products and to scale them.

Based on this work, FWWB supported 370 institutions that disbursed more than 45,000 toilet loans. The FWWB project has had an impact on over 1 million women across 17 states in India.