Significant Progress Report on Microcredit to Be Released Next Week

The Microcredit Summit Campaign, launched in 1997 by representatives from 137 countries, will announce impressive results from a study of data covering the first eight years of the project and gathered from 3,100 microfinance institutions worldwide at a news conference on Wednesday, December 7, 2005, 1:30 pm EST, at the United Nations, Room C226, 100 UN Plaza, New York.

The progress report will show substantial increases in reaching the campaign’s goal of providing microcredit to 100 million of the world’s poorest families, those earning less than US$1 per day. The campaign is in support of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, adopted by more than 180 heads of state and government in 2000.

Sam Daley-Harris, Microcredit Summit Campaign director, said final results of its ongoing initiative will be released at the Global Microcredit Summit to be held November 12, 2006, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “Tens of millions of the world’s poorest families are achieving economic gains by qualifying for microloans to fuel small businesses and secure their financial well being,” Daley-Harris said. “This is positive, encouraging news in the battle against world poverty.”

The Microcredit Summit Campaign’s progress report comes at the conclusion of the UN’s 2005 International Year of Microcredit. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that “microfinance has proved its value in many countries as a weapon against poverty and hunger.”

Microloan programs, which created a revolution in banking, have expanded rapidly around the world and now are operating in more than 130 countries. They share many of the characteristics of the world-recognized microcredit system first developed by Professor Muhammad Yunus, founder and managing director of The Grameen Bank of Bangladesh.