To our view, most existing impact studies in rural microfinance display an additional
shortcoming. They intend to assess the link between a “treatment” (be it access to credit or other
financial services) and an effect, but they do not consider the processes through which the
financial services are designed, delivered, and used. This is paradoxical, all the most if we
consider the diversity of organizational forms and financial services that can be found on the
field, both in the formal and informal sectors. Those processes exhibit not only an economic but
also a social and political dimension that are not always given appropriate attention. Likewise,
the economic, social and political contexts into which those processes are embedded are often
overlooked. It is our assumption that bringing processes into the picture can highlight the causal
mechanisms through which positive as well as negative outcomes are achieved, thereby
providing us with more relevant results both in the academic and the practitioner fields.
The lack of transparency and accountability of the microfinance sector can also be a limit to
rigorous impact studies. Finally, even when the range of potential outcomes considered by
microfinance impact studies is very wide, it does not include the issue of rural employment. Even
though rural finance and rural employment are among the key challenges identified by the
forthcoming World Development Report 2008, devoted to agriculture and rural development, to
our knowledge, no study has yet set out to systematically address the linkages between rural
microfinance and rural employment. This proposal intends to bridge the gap.