Dhaka, April 19,(BDNEWS)- The Microcredit Summit Campaign officials on Tuesday announced that their campaign has been extended to 2015 with two new goals designed to help the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) effort.
By extending their campaign they have targeted to reach 175 million poorest families of the world and 875 million members of those families.
The announcement came at the Campaign's Latin America/Caribbean Microcredit Summit in Santiago, Chile beginning on Tuesday. More than 600 leaders in the field of micro-finance have gathered in Santiago for the Latin America/Caribbean Region Microcredit Summit to celebrate the International Year of Microcredit and launch the final push to reach 100 million poorest families.
Another goal of this extension of the campaign that 100 million of the world's poorest families can raise purchasing capacity from below US$ 1 a day to above US$ 1 a day by 2015. With an average of five per family 500 million people would have risen above $1 a day nearly completing the Millennium Development Goal on halving absolute poverty.
The official re-launch of the Campaign will take place at the Global Microcredit Summit to be held November 12-15, 2006 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The original call to extend the Microcredit Summit Campaign came at a 2003 meeting of its Campaign Executive Committee.
The MDGs were adopted by more than 180 heads of state at the Millennium Summit of United Nations in 2000. The first goal calls for cutting in half the number of people living on less than US$1 a day by 2015. Launched in 1997, the Microcredit Summit aimed 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, some 81 million families had been reached with micro-loans, 55 million of whom were among the poorest when they took their first loan.
Microcredit Summit Campaign officials say that the UN's poverty goal cannot be met if microcredit remains low among donor priorities.
Though non-government as well as government organisations in Bangladesh are presently implementing various projects or programmes for poverty alleviation, there is an absence of a strong institutional framework. The Palli Karma Shohayak Foundation (PKSF), the apex funding organisation of micro-finance programmes, was set up with an objective of poverty alleviation to create employment opportunities on a large scale and also to help the landless and the poor.
BDNEWS/1812 hrs
