Value assessment of Access to Finance Rwanda

Access to Finance Rwanda (AFR) was established in 2010 to promote access to financial services in Rwanda. To achieve its objective, AFR has taken a making markets work for the poor (M4P) approach.

In 2015, Genesis Analytics was contracted to take stock of AFR’s progress in achieving its goal and to conduct a value for money (VfM) assessment of AFR’s investments. The aim of the assessment was to generate evidence of the programme’s successes, impact and expected impact, as well as to provide recommendations on how to adjust AFR’s investment portfolio and implementation approach to maximise VfM.

To complete the assessment, Genesis first conducted a review of good practices in financial-sector deepening programmes globally, to build a framework that would assess the overall relevance and appropriateness of AFR’s portfolio.

After this AFR project documentation and data were reviewed, interviews were conducted with project implementers and discussions with project beneficiaries were held. Genesis used DFID’s VfM assessment framework to organise the qualitative and quantitative data collected and assessed the economy, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and equity of AFR.

The findings and conclusions were used by AFR for the development of its Phase 2 strategy.