Institute of Development Studies
The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) is one of the world’s leading organisations for research, teaching and communications on international development.
From 2000 to 2004, IDS coordinated the Imp-Act action research programme on social performance, a global Ford Foundation project involving 30 MFIs and two other UK universities. Since then, IDS has been a founding member of, and host to, the Imp-Act Consortium. Through the work of Imp-Act, IDS has focused on action research around key themes in SPM, including capacity building of MFIs and the organisations that support them, social auditing, and supporting scale-up of SPM through documentation and advocacy. IDS also conducts impact assessments and poverty assessments of microfinance interventions around the world. IDS contributes to a number of practitioner forums focused on social performance issues, namely the international Social Performance Task Force, (facilitating the SPM sub-committee), and participating in the Communications, Social Indicators and Consumer Report sub-committees.
