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. More on the Microfinance awards here.

Energy

The Awards are based on our Energy Impact Index, which ranks participating off-grid energy companies on the difference they make to their customers, by sub-sector. It looks at three pathways:

Access & Inclusion — how successful are companies at reaching people who didn’t have energy access before, at serving lower-income households, and at sorting out problems when they come up?

Everyday Wellbeing — how much does daily life actually change for customers?

Opportunity — does the product open up a way to earn?

Impact Score = the average of the Access & Inclusion, Everyday Wellbeing and Opportunity scores.

The Index has evolved since our first energy awards in 2024, when it looked at Impact, Customer Experience and Access across five product categories plus a Consumer Protection Award. Scores from the two editions aren’t directly comparable. More on the energy awards here.