RESOURCE CENTER

JOANA AFONSO

MIMOSA / E-MFP

Dr. Joana Afonso is the Financial Inclusion Specialist at the European Microfinance Platform (e-MFP) and supports e-MFP’s MIMOSA project, which provides a methodological assessment of market saturation and risk of over-indebtedness for leading microfinance markets.

Joana has led multiple projects pertaining to indicators and standards, often in collaboration with the Cerise+SPTF team.  These projects include, among others:

    • The Green Index, an environmental performance assessment tool that was the basis for the development of Dimension 7 of the Universal Standards for Social and Environmental Performance Management (USSEPM).
    • Ongoing collaboration between the e-MFP Investors Action Group, Cerise’s LabODD, and SPTF Outcomes Working Group, with most recent activities focusing on measuring outcomes using the SDG framework.
    • The human resources landscape survey conducted in 2020-21, which informed revisions to Dimension 5 of the USSEPM.
    • Defining a common language and basic indicators to evaluate the social performance of savings products and WASH investment projects. 

Before joining e-MFP, Joana was an academic researcher at the University of Portsmouth in the UK between 2015 and 2020. Her Ph.D thesis focused on the challenges associated with evaluation methodologies and was based on the implementation of longitudinal evaluations of microcredit programmes in Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and Ecuador. She also conducted research within the Microfinance in Crisis research project, led by the Université Paris-Sorbonne, with field work in the Dominican Republic on the role of loan officers in the prevention of client over-indebtedness.

Joana began her microfinance career as a loan officer at NGO ANDC in Portugal.

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Practical Dreamers

Cerise+SPTF are practical dreamers. Since our origins in the late 1990s-early 2000s (when inclusive finance was better known as microfinance), there has been steadily growing interest in social performance: in making sure that vulnerable low-income clients are not exploited, and that products and services help create better lives. Many organizations have published high-level principles and frameworks. Cerise+SPTF translate those aspirations into concrete, practical actions.
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Cerise+SPTF is a joint venture between SPTF | US, SPTF | Europe, and Cerise. Cerise+SPTF pursues a common strategic plan and shares resources under a Memorandum of Understanding. For legal purposes, we remain three separate entities incorporated in, and subject to the laws of, our respective home countries.