A Proposed Islamic Microfinance Impact Assessment Methodology

Impact assessment of microfinance programs have been remained the foremost concern of microfinance stakeholders for optimal policy measures. The existing literature regarding the impact assessment varies from parametric to experimental methods to evaluate the performance of microfinance programs across the world however; the literature is lacking a single measure to reveal maximum possible changes in socioeconomic variables resulting from microfinance institutions’ intervention. This study aims to develop a composite index for evaluating the performance of microfinance programs in multi-dimensional contexts. The study exposes a set of eight “diverse indicators” to evaluate the performance of a microfinance program on a wider socioeconomic scale. The dimensions of the index are consist of economic (Income, saving) and socioeconomic (poverty, access to basic facilities, family empowerment) indicators. The changes in deprivations of household, based on the selected indicators, reveal the intensity of success of a microfinance program towards their goals. Finally, we have developed an index by the interaction of incidence and intensity of socioeconomic deprivations. The index is named as “Multidimensional Microfinance Deprivation Index”. This is an index developed in the same line as multidimensional poverty index. The implications of this study are three folds; firstly, it will open up a new dimension of literature in the field of microfinance including Islamic microfinance by instigating an important area. Secondly, it may provide a better alternative to microfinance’s stakeholders to investigate the impact assessment of microfinance programs on a wider socioeconomic scale rather than a few economic. Last but not the least, the study integrates diverse socioeconomic indicators, after assigning weights and adjustment to portray an overall picture of the performance of microfinance in terms of uplifting the socioeconomic conditions of the poor and financially marginalized people.

3D Simulations of Low-Mass Proto-Stellar Disks With Certain Initial Conditions Using Smoothed Particle Hydro Dynamics

Results of the numerical study on the initial formation stages of low-mass protostellar systems leading to single, binary, triplet, and quadruple protostar systems formation are reported here. In addition to these various types of protostellar objects we also investigate the overall structure formation that takes place within collapsing molecular cores that yield during the course of evolution the spiral structure formation, ring formation, and bar formation under various initial conditions chosen for a rotating solar mass cloud of molecular hydrogen to mimic the states prevailing in star formation regions in our Milky Way galaxy. There have been three key parameters belonging to the initial star forming conditions whose effects on the overall outcome of protostallar systems have been examined. These parameters are the initial thermal state of the prestellar core, the amplitude of azimuthal density perturbation introduced in initially uniform density state of the core, and the impact of the critical density which governs the transition from isothermal to adiabatic thermodynamic behavior of the collapsing core. For protostellar binaries, the separation is determined as a function of the initial thermal state of the core by varying its initial temperature. For this purpose a slightly modified version of the Burkert and Bodenheimer collapse test is taken into consideration. We find that the result is fairly sensitive to both the initial thermal state of the cloud and the initial azimuthal density perturbation’s amplitude A. For A=10 %, variations of only 1 unit Kelvin below 10 K causes a change of up to 100 AU in protobinary separation, while for this small amplitude of perturbation the initial temperatures above 10 K result a single low-mass fragment, instead of a binary, that does not reach even near to the protostellar densities. However, protostellar binaries, do appear if the amplitude of perturbation is enhanced from 10 % to 25 %. A star forming hydrogen gas is normally considered to be initially at 10 K. For structural formation study, we have explored that an oscillation around this normally considered value can be influential in determining the fate of a collapsing gas as it evolves in its structural properties that may lead to formation of proto-stars. We examined the initial range of temperature of star forming gas between 8 K to 12 K and tried to compare the emerging physical properties within the early phase of formation of protostellar system. According to our findings the spiral structures are likely to appear in a strongly perturbed molecular cores that commence their phase of collapse from temperatures lesser than 10 K. However, cores with initial temperatures more than 10 K potentially develop, instead of spiral, a ring structure which afterwards experiences the clumps formation. It is possible to observe a transition from spiral to ring instability at a typical initial core temperature of 10 K. Similarly, while investigating the effects of critical density variations on the evolution of protostellar systems, we find that the critical density affects the structural evolution of the envelope of gas, also the dimension of emerging rotating disk structures during collapse too get affected as well as the number of fragments appearing from the concluding fragmentation of the disks. It is suggested that this mechanism has the potential to give birth to young protostellar objects that may eventually constitute systems of bound multiple protostars. The entire numerical experiment is conducted by using 250025 SPH particles to construct virtually the geometry of each molecular core investigated here.