Towards a Performance MeasurementFramework for Community DevelopmentFinance Institutions in the UK

Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) are publicly funded organisationsthat provide small loans to people in financially underserved areas of the UK. Policy makershave repeatedly sought to understand and measure the performance of CDFIs to ensurethe efficient use of public funds, but have struggled to identify an appropriate way of doingso. In this article, we empirically derive a framework which measures the performance ofCDFIs through an analysis of their stakeholder relationships. Based on qualitative datafrom 20 English CDFIs, we develop a typology of CDFIs according to three dimensions:organisational structure, type of lending, and type of market served. Following on from this,we derive several propositions that consider how these dimensions relate to the financialand social performance of CDFIs, and provide the basis for a performance measurementframework...