FinWell Wales

Purple Shoots, a not-for-profit community development financial institution, provides small, flexible loans alongside peer-led support for individuals seeking to start or grow micro businesses, offering opportunity where traditional lenders often cannot.

Financial vulnerability, economic inactivity, and poor health disproportionately affect those excluded from mainstream finance. Traditional lending often overlooks these groups, limiting access to safety nets and opportunities for independence. Using longitudinal data and innovative research methods, the project aims to rigorously evaluate the impact of Purple Shoot’s loans and self-reliant groups on financial resilience, health and wellbeing. We seek to generate evidence to refine microcredit programmes and influence policy in the UK.

FinWell Wales is part of a suite of projects in the FinWell programme of work. This programme aims at better understanding the link between income and health and wellbeing, including the interventions and mediating mechanisms that might facilitate this association.

The first project, FinWell-Glasgow, started in 2014 and was a two-year project funded by the Chief Scientist Office. The second project FinWell-London (2019-2020) was funded by Impact on Urban Health. The third FinWell-Covid project (2021-2022) was funded by ESRC (grant number ES/V01532X/1). The fourth was the Real Accounts project (2023-2024), led by Nest Insight and in collaboration with the Centre for Personal Financial Wellbeing at Aston University, funded by the Aviva Foundation.

All these FinWell projects took a mixed-method approach using combinations of financial diaries, in-depth interviews, and Q methodology.

• Biosca O, Bellazzecca E, Donaldson C, Bala A, Mojarrieta M, White G, McHugh N, Baker R, & Morduch J. (2024) Living on low-incomes with multiple long-term health conditions: A new method to explore the complex interaction between finance and health. PloS One, 26;19(6):e0305827. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0305827
• Rendall, J., McHugh, N., Baker, R., Mason, H., & Biosca, O. (2024). From polarity to plurality: Perceptions of COVID‐19 and policy measures in England and Scotland. Health Expectations, 27(3), e14069. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hex.14069
• Ibrahim, F., McHugh, N., Biosca, O., Baker, R., Laxton, T., & Donaldson, C. (2021) Microcredit as a public health initiative? Exploring mechanisms and pathways to health and wellbeing. Social Science & Medicine, 270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113633
• Biosca, O., McHugh, N., Ibrahim, F., Baker, R., Laxton, T., & Donaldson, C. (2020). Walking a Tightrope: Using Financial Diaries to Investigate Day-to-Day Financial Decisions and the Social Safety Net of the Financially Excluded. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 689(1), 46–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716220921154
• McHugh N, Baker R, Biosca O, Ibrahim F, & Donaldson C (2019). Who knows best? A Q methodology study to explore perspectives of professional stakeholders and community participants on health in low-income communities BMC Health Services Research 19, 35 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-019-3884-9
• McHugh N, Biosca O, Donaldson C. (2017). From wealth to health: evaluating microfinance as a complex intervention. Evaluation; 23(2):209-225 https://doi.org/10.1177/1356389017697622
• FinWell London Financial Diaries website
• Biosca, O. et al (2020). Managing finances and multiple long-term conditions: eliciting the perspectives of individuals living on low incomes. Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health, Glasgow Caledonian University.

Project Lead at GCU: Professor Olga Biosca

Current project team at GCU: Professor Neil McHugh, Dr Katerina Papadopoulou