60dB Social Impact Awards

We’ve completed thousands of impact measurement projects globally, across a variety of sectors including financial inclusion, off-grid energy, and agriculture. By asking standardized questions to end-users across the board, we are able to provide genuine benchmarks on impact performance and enable organizations to understand impact relative to peers. As a natural next step, we wanted to acknowledge and celebrate all those achieving a top score for their social performance within our Benchmarks.

What are the 60dB Social Impact Awards?

The 60 Decibels Social Impact Awards exist to publicly recognize the organizations generating the most impact within their sector. They serve as a way to highlight the organizations whose product or service are top ranked across different impact metrics according to end-users themselves. This in turn creates a ‘north star’ to inspire others in the sector and guide thinking for performance targets and improved organizational efficiency.

Congratulations to all award recipients, listed in full below. Your customers have spoken: you’re delivering some of the best impact in the industry relative to your peers. This recognition is testament to the impact you have generated for underserved communities within your sector, and the hard work of your team. We can’t wait to see this list grow!

Award Criteria

Microfinance

Awards are based on our Microfinance Index, which assesses financial service providers’ social performance across twenty-three indicators and six impact themes and ranks their performance by region (Africa, Asia and Latin America). We use a standard survey to gather data for the indicators from a representative sample of clients at each financial service provider.

To rank performance, for each financial service provider we calculate a relative score for each indicator, average the indicator scores within the same dimension, and then average the scores across dimensions for an Index score. The Index scores are ranked from highest to lowest. All indicators within each dimension are equally weighted, and all dimensions are weighted equally. However, some dimensions have a different number of indicators (as seen on p16 of this year’s Microfinance Index).

60 Decibels selected these indicators and dimensions based on our experience in Financial Inclusion and with consultation from experts. 60 Decibels did not select the institutions to participate in the Index, their participation was voluntary and sponsored by their investors or by the FSPs themselves.

Energy

The Awards are based on our Energy Impact Index, which looks at three areas:

Impact – how transformative or meaningful are the energy products or services for families? We use our Quality of Life indicator here – looking at the % of company customers who said their new energy access had ‘very much improved’ their and their families’ lives.

Customer experience – how do customers feel about their interactions with the company and the broader service they provide? We used four of our indicators here:

• Ease of use (Customer Challenge Rate inverted)
• Issue Resolution
• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Access – how successful are companies at reaching previously unserved populations? Here we use three of our indicators: First Access, No Access to Alternatives, and the Inclusivity Rate (IR).

Here’s how we calculate the Index Scores: 

Index Score = average of Impact + Customer Experience + Access Scores. Each of the area scores were calculated by averaging the results of the indicators within that theme. We only included projects where we had at least five of eight of the indicators results. For projects with any missing values, we input the sub-sector average as a neutral proxy. 

For the three indicators in the Index that are not on a 0-100% scale (CES, NPS, and IIR) we normalised the results by converting them to a 0-100% scale. The result is a % score for each indicator in the Index, averaged to give an overall Index score, where the higher the number, the better. The maximum Index Score was 74% and the bottom was 36% – so there was quite a range.

Once we’d done all that, we then ranked the Index Scores to find the top performers in the following categories: Solar Lantern, Solar Home System, Mini-Grid, Appliance, Clean Cooking and Consumer Protection.