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Each quarter, a member of SIDI's operational team shares with us a mission carried out with partners and their beneficiaries. Cristina Alvarez, Head of Operations in Latin America, tells us about her mission in Bolivia with the microfinance institution Idepro IFD (Institution Financière de Développement). A mission focused on support, the strategic pillar of SIDI's mission.
I went to Bolivia in July 2025 to meet our partners. This time, it was a mission focused on supporting our partner Idepro IFD, a major microfinance institution in the country with over 45,000 borrowers.
It’s a special situation. In May 2024, after a merger, Idepro IFD absorbed our former partner, Sembrar Sartawi. Sembrar Sartawi tended to lend in rural and agricultural areas, whereas Idepro IFD is more rooted in urban areas, in trade and services.
SIDI, already a shareholder in Sembrar Sartawi, encouraged the merger. It remained a shareholder and lender of Idepro IFD, just as it was of Sembrar Sartawi. Our presence, as a supportive institutional shareholder, marks a new departure for the organization, which had previously relied solely on local social entrepreneurs.
At the end of 2024, Idepro IFD begins work on a new strategic plan in which SIDI is involved as a shareholder. The organization defines new mission, organizational and financial objectives.
One of these objectives is to improve the measurement of its social and environmental performance, in order to strengthen the impact that its range of financial products and services has on its customers, their families and the environment. Our discussions gave rise to this support project, designed to help them define a social and environmental performance management strategy, and identify the indicators for measuring it.
At SIDI, one of our main areas of intervention is to specifically support our partners in these areas.
We began working together remotely, with my colleague Ariane Bevierre, in charge of Social and Environmental Performance (SEP). We then organized our mission to coincide with several governance meetings organized by Idepro IFD, including their Board of Directors meeting.
The day after our arrival in La Paz, we take part in the newly created Impact Committee, to present the project prepared with their teams.
For us, it’s always an achievement to be involved in governance bodies and to introduce this new subject to our partners. Sometimes, some people consider social and environmental performance to be a side issue, not a priority.
On the contrary, when we present the project to the Committee and then to the Board of Directors, I’m struck by their interest. How can we go further than defining objectives? How can we concretely measure our social and environmental impact? How can we integrate this with our customers? Their involvement is particularly motivating for us.
Discover their technological innovations
The next day, their Head of Information and Management Systems presented us with an entire project based on data management. We learn that Idepro IFD is in the process of creating a huge database that will enable each of the divisions to feed back their information and identify the processing required for their day-to-day operations.
For my colleague Ariane Bevierre, this is excellent news. The existence of this project is an essential asset for improving the measurement of social and environmental performance, and even for anticipating certain risk situations. For example, to show the fragility of a crop in the face of climate change, and to offer customers training in agroecology so that they can diversify their crops or optimize their water resources.
Visiting customers who benefit from Idepro IFD loans
Over the next few days, we head for El Alto, a town perched at an altitude of 4149 metres! It’s very impressive, with its streets and houses stretching as far as the eye can see. We meet several of Idepro IFD’s customers and discover another facet of its technological advance. Among them is a young woman working in the textile industry. It was thanks to the savings application developed by the institution that she was able to start saving. In Bolivia, most young people have a cell phone, but few have access to banking services. Being able to save every month with her phone proved very practical for her, and she was able to develop a new business thanks to this money. Idepro IFD has thus succeeded in reaching out to a young audience, largely in the informal economy.
Visiting the field, we can clearly see the social impact on loan beneficiaries, with improved living conditions and the ability to save, not just borrow.
But you can’t always be in the field. That’s why helping a partner to monitor its social and environmental performance gives a new dimension to its impact: measuring it, qualifying it and understanding it on a large scale thanks to a structured analysis of its data.
Back in France, my colleague Ariane and I discuss how the mission went. Satisfied with the work we’ve done with governance, we leave motivated to further improve the project thanks to our partner’s contributions. We also look forward to working with partners who can benefit from our feedback.
Interview by Anne-Isabelle Barthélémy
To find out more, go to“Understanding social and environmental performance measurement“.
