Microcredit Summit Campaign
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The Microcredit Summit Campaign is the civil-society initiative that was born out of the first Microcredit Summit. In February 1997, RESULTS Educational Fund, a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible organization dedicated to mass educational strategies to generate the will to end world hunger and poverty, convened the first Microcredit Summit. More than 2,900 delegates from 137 countries attended the Summit, held in Washington, DC, and they launched a nine-year campaign to reach 100 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by the end of 2005. Essentially this means that the Campaign is working to have 100 million very poor people access microcredit.
The Microcredit Summit Campaign does not actually dispense microloans, but rather requires its member institutions to report the number of clients on a form known as an "Institutional Action Plan." The progress of the Campaign towards its "100 million poorest" goal is measured by the number of clients reported by their member institutions as having received their first loan while they were among the poorest. The Campaign uses both US$1 a day and national poverty lines when determining who falls into the category of "the poorest". According to the Campaign's 2005 annual report: "As of December 31, 2004, 3,164 microcredit1 institutions have reported reaching 92,270,289 clients, 66,614,871 of whom were among the poorest when they took their first loan. Of these poorest clients, 83.5 percent, or 55,622,406 million, are women."
Since the original Microcredit Summit in 1997, the Campaign has held nine additional summits. The years and location of those meetings are as follows:
- 1998 New York City, USA — Global Meeting of Councils
- 1999 Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire — Global Meeting of Councils
- 2000 Harare, Zimbabwe — First Regional Meeting for Africa
- 2001 New Delhi, India — First Regional Meeting for Asia
- 2001 Puebla, Mexico — First Regional Meeting for Latin America & Caribbean
- 2002 New York City, USA — Microcredit Summit +5
- 2004 Dhaka, Bangladesh — Second Regional Meeting for Asia
- 2004 Amman, Jordan — Second Regional Meeting for Middle East/Africa
- 2005 Santiago, Chile — Second Regional Meeting for Latin America/Caribbean
The Campaign organized a summit called the Global Microcredit Summit 2006 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, November 12 to 15, 2006. According to Campaign literature, it is at that summit that the final evaluation of the "100 million poorest" goal will be made with the publication of their annual report for 2006. The Campaign will also be extended beyond its original nine-year span with two new goals for the end of 2015.
Those goals are:
- Working to ensure that 175 million of the world’s poorest families, especially the women of those families, are receiving credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by the end of 2015.
- Working to ensure that 100 million of the world’s poorest families move from below US$1 a day adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) to above US$1 a day adjusted for PPP, by the end of 2015.
In addition to organizing meetings, the Microcredit Summit Campaign has launched a number of strategic initiatives including the organization of two-hour workshops on cost-effective poverty measurement tools for more than 3,000 practitioners in 35 countries. The Campaign has also begun to organize three- and five-day trainings on cost-effectively integrating microfinance with education in HIV/AIDS prevention, reproductive health, and child survival.
[edit] External links
- [1] Official website
