NEW YORK: More than 106 million of the world’s poorest families received a microloan in 2007, surpassing a goal set 10 years earlier, according to a report released yesterday by the Microcredit Summit Campaign (MSC). The campaign is a project of the RESULTS Educational Fund, a US-based grassroots advocacy organization committee to ending hunger and poverty. Microloans are used to help people living in extreme poverty start or expand a range of tiny businesses such as husking rice, selling tortillas, and delivering cell phone services to remote villages.
“This is a tremendous achievement that many people thought was far too difficult to reach,” said Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus who was present at the announcement. “What makes it even more remarkable is that loans to more than 100 million very poor families now touch the lives of more than half a billion family members around the world. That is half of the world’s poorest people.”
Organizers say that when the goal was originally set in 1997, fewer than eight million very poor clients had a microloan. That number has grown by more than 1,300 percent between 1997 and 2007. In 2007, microloans went to 88 million very poor women. The MSC — which brings together microcredit practitioners, advocates, educational institutions, donor agencies, international financial institutions, non governmental organizations and others involved with microfinance to promote best practices in the field — counts the world’s poorest as those who live in the bottom half of those living below their nation’s poverty line, or any of the nearly one billion people living on less than $1 a day.
At the first Microcredit Summit in 1997, then US first lady and current US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “I am thrilled to see such a turnout for this summit which is one of the most important gatherings that we could have anywhere in our world. This is truly a historic occasion .... And this first global summit on microcredit offers an unprecedented opportunity for us to draw attention to the successes of microcredit in developing countries, as well as in applications in advanced economies around the world.”
“During the past decade the campaign has organized 12 conferences attended by more than 14,000 delegates in order to examine trends, debate scholarly papers, and expose practitioners to training and innovations that are relevant to accelerating progress toward expanding outreach to the very poor,” said Alex Counts, president and CEO of Grameen Foundation. “The campaign spent less than $12 million during the period 1997-2007, while the amount of microloans in the hands of the poor has expanded from an estimated $1 billion to $15 billion, demonstrating the significant leverage possible when an international campaign is able to mobilize millions of people and institutions on a global scale.”
While the first microloans in the developing world were made in the 1970s, for decades, this quiet revolution gained ground largely unnoticed by world leaders and development specialists. The year after the 1997 Microcredit Summit, the UN declared 2005 as the Year of Microcredit. In 2006 Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize.
