摘要：This paper aims to analyze the financial sustentability versus social impact of microfinance institutions in sub-Saharan Africa region. The sample consisted of 246 microfinance institutions present in this region that have their results published in the database of the organization MIX (Microfinance Information Exchange) in 2009, which is the most complete source of information of the sector. For the study, we considered various social and financial indicators that are a reference for specialized entities in evaluating the performance of microfinance institutions (as in the case of MIX and Planet Rating) and are typically used in similar research. In accordance with the results obtained institutions with lower amounts of loans to GDP per capita of the respective country in which they perform the activity can have a far social reaching, because they concede smaller borrows, whose target are customers with less income and cover a greater number of women in their financial operations. It was evident, too, the existence of trade-off between social impact and financial performance, in other words, the institutions that had the poor as its target, showed economic and financial indicators less positive. Generally, it was found that institutions with greater focus on the poorest obtained lower profitability’s, although offered higher interest rates and had better efficiency indicators in the activity. Regarding financial structure, it was found that these institutions do not have much capacity to attract deposits and present a higher financial autonomy against other, possibly because access to more donations or grants, once the average results generated in the activity are negative and by itself does not guarantee financial sustainability. Finally, we studied the constraints of the financial performance of microfinance institutions in sub-Saharan Africa region and it was found that it is mainly the size and efficiency that affect the profitability of the activity.
