Quarterly Report July – September 30, 2012

The agreement encompasses a core Leader award and a mechanism for USAID Missions to issue Associate Awards. Since its inception in 2005, the LWA has grown to include a portfolio with a total value of more than $272 million, which includes both the Leader cooperative agreement ($19.7 million over eight years) and 16 Associate Awards. The purpose of the Leader award is to advance the frontiers of practical knowledge in relation to microfinance, microenterprise development, and sustainable rural livelihoods. The Leader award includes activities that seed innovation, demonstrate better practices, document results, and disseminate findings that advance the global state-of-the-practice. These activities are in the form of Leader Activities, Strategic Learning Initiatives (SLIs), and Design/Assessments for USAID Missions and Operating Units. The Leader staff at FHI 360 continues to lead knowledge management activities across the FIELD-Support portfolio. They monitor progress of FIELD-Support activities, provide technical support when needed, review and process payments, and ensure contractual and financial compliance. The FIELD-Support management has provided oversight for all Leader activities and Associate Awards that were implemented by the consortium members, contributing to their technical design, implementation, and monitoring quality. Since the beginning of the program in 2005, the FIELD-Support Leader has supported the implementation of 20 Leader activities plus 10 SLIs. In addition, each of the 9 core members of the consortium has used core management funds to support FIELD-Support related activities. The Leader Activities and SLIs that are still currently being implemented are discussed in the following sections. The IPA-led Evaluation activity, "Graduating the Poorest into Microfinance Evaluation," is testing the effectiveness of a methodology for graduating the most vulnerable households in Ethiopia out of extreme poverty. The supported households are being monitored and will be members of Ethiopia's National Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP). IPA completed endline data collection in August and is currently drafting the endline report. Impacts appear large, though some questions remain, such as a puzzlingly large impact on business profits. IPA presented on findings from other graduation programs at the Global Graduation Workshop held in Paris in July. They also submitted a proposal to present their findings at a future event. The evaluation activity aims to provide insights into the effectiveness of the graduation methodology and inform future programming in microfinance and microenterprise development.