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.

Salibase: A Database of Simulated Alignments

Simulated alignments are an alternative of benchmark alignments used to comparing the Multiple Sequence Alignments tools. The true evolutionary history of simulated sequence is most important motivation which is very valuable to generate accurate phylogenetic trees and alignments. Simulated alignments are also used to validate and investigate accuracy of multiple sequence alignments methods. The researcher can generate simulated alignments including varying sequence length, indel size, insertion rate, deletion rate and number of sequences. User may have to reconstruct the large number of simulated alignments using simulated tools which is very cumbersome and time consuming job. It is also required professional training and expertise for generation of such a big data. Currently there is no databank available which may help the researcher to download simulated alignments for their study. Major focus of our study is to develop database of simulated alignments (SAliBASE) with varying parameters including varying insertion rate, varying deletion rate, varying sequence length, varying number of sequences and varying number of indel size. For generation of sequence/alignments specifically we generate a collection of trees and use each as a guided tree in the alignments algorithm. For such big data analysis we will use R software that contains various types of packages (ape, base, boot, class, treesim etc.). We use package Treesim for the generating of phylogenetic Tree. Phylogenetic trees are used to describe the relationship among species and genes. Five types of parameters trees we generated using R in Newick format, which is the standard input tree format for simulated tools. We proposed indel-seq-gen simulated tool for generation of simulated alignments and sequences. As a part of this study comparative study of simulated alignments tools will also be conducted.