Introduction

Analysis of the poverty impacts of microfinance is almost exclusively focused on the direct impacts on microfinance clients. The Imp-Act programme emphasizes the need to also consider the 'wider impacts' achieved through non-client beneficiaries of microfinance. To fully understand and achieve the social impacts to which microfinance aspires wider impacts need to be assessed and programmes designed to achieve these outcomes. This volume introduces methodologies, in most cases developed by practitioners, which measure these wider or 'social' impacts and use the results as a point of departure for understanding what institutional and policy interventions are required to make them more pro-poor. The principal wider impacts discussed are health, community governance, postwar reconstruction, labour and finance markets and, in relation to Bolivia and Indonesia, the economy as a whole. We represent research into such wider impacts as a public good which is beneficial for all microfinance institutions (MFIs)-in particular for their public relations-and for the poverty impact of the sector as a whole, but which the individual institutions typically do not have the resources to assess. This indicates a clear role for donors. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.