It was more than 35 degrees and I was sheltered only by a tin roof participating in a weekly meeting of loan group clients in a back alley off a main road in Kampala, Uganda.

They were talking about how they were using their Opportunity loan. Present were several market stall holders, a small restaurant owner, a motorbike taxi operator, a second hand clothes retailer and several others.

While discussions of loan applications were taking place, various forms were being shuffled around and filled in with the help of others in the group. The loan officer in charge of the group shared with me a list of information on the clients there. The list contained loan sizes, repayment amounts and a couple other pieces of information about the group members. Needless to say, the information he showed me was quite basic.

Opportunity is looking into how we can better understand the families we serve to empower them to transform their lives, their children’s futures and their communities. And the way we do this is through Social Performance Management.

Social Performance is a program that helps us understand who our clients are and what their needs are through detailed data collection and reporting. Analysing this data helps us design products and services to aid these families’ journey out of poverty.

As I saw in Uganda, our loan officers primarily collect the data we need by individually surveying clients using paper forms along with many other reams of paperwork. This is very challenging not only because literacy is a real issue for a large proportion of our clients, but loan officers have very limited time to spend at each loan meeting. The loan officer then needs to input the data at the branch, often with limited internet connectivity and basic systems.

My visit helped us understand how we can improve this process, and through your support, Opportunity has invested considerably in training staff and IT infrastructure to make data collection simpler at many of our 40 partners across 22 countries.

The Social Performance work we are doing at Opportunity is only going to grow and develop. And now you can view our new and interactive Social Performance website that illustrates the data we’ve collected to date. Check it out at www.spm.opportunity.org

We look forward to updating and improving the website as more of our partners collect data going forward.

Over time, we hope we’ll be able to help you better understand just how much your support is improving the lives of families living in poverty.