SANTIAGO, 20 April 2005 — Kofi Annan, Jeffrey Sachs, and Paul Wolfowitz will have unexpected help in their efforts to achieve the millennium development goals, especially the goal to cut absolute poverty in half by 2015. Microcredit summit campaign officials announced at their Latin America/Caribbean meeting in Santiago, Chile yesterday that the campaign has been extended to 2015 with two new goals designed to help the millennium development goals (MDGs) effort.
Launched in 1997, the Microcredit Summit Campaign aims to reach 100 million of the world’s poorest families with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by the end of 2005. The United Nations declared 2005 as the International Year of Microcredit. By the end of 2003, 81 million families had been reached with microloans, 55 million of whom were among the poorest when they took their first loan.
Microcredit meeting, which was held in Amman-Jordan during Oct. 10-13, 2004, during which Prince Tala1 ibn Abdul Aziz, AGFUND president, announced the launch of AGFUND initiative to set un an Arab African Fund for microcredit, with the aim of mobilizing the necessary mechanism needed for this type of micro-credit in the Arab region and Africa.