Systematic review methodology for development: An example from microfinance

Big international development donors such as the UK’s Department for International Development and USAID have recently started using systematic review as a methodology to assess the effectiveness of various development interventions to help them decide what is the ‘best’ intervention to spend money on. Such an approach to evidence-based decision-making has long been practiced in the health sector in the US, UK, and elsewhere but it is relatively new in the development field. In this article we use the case of a systematic review of the impact of microfinance on the poor in sub-Saharan African to indicate how systematic review as a methodology can be used to assess the impact of specific development interventions.