Micro-lending Bangladesh meeting aims to extend credit to world's poorest

Some 1,400 delegates from around the world are set to assemble next week in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, to devise new ways to extend credit to the globe's poorest people.
Bangladesh is home to the Grameen (Village) Bank, founded nearly two decades ago, which is credited with developing a unique micro-credit system to help overcome poverty and is estimated to have over two million borrowers.
Participants at the four-day Asia Pacific Micro-credit Summit which begins Monday will seek ways to increase the number of beneficiaries of so-called micro-lending.
"There will be 47 sessions to brainstorm about how to extend small credits," said Fazlul Quadir, one of the conference's organisers.
The experience of the Grameen Bank and comparable institutions will be particularly key to the delegates as they tackle the problem of offering loans to people in undeveloped countries who cannot borrow from formal lending institutions because they have no collateral.
Development experts from China, India, the World Bank and non-governmental organisations will participate in the conference which comes ahead of the United Nations International Year of Micro-credit next year.
The conference will bring together some 1,400 participants from around the globe including Zanela Mbeki, wife of the South African president, Misa Telefoni, deputy prime minister of Samoa and Indian former defence minister Sharad Power, along with central bank governors of several countries.
Over the years, microcredit has played a major role in bringing down the number of poor in developing countries, conference organisers said.
They said at least 48 million people had benefited from micro-credit programmes in Asia alone, some 11 million of them in Bangladesh.
Queen Sofia of Spain arrived Saturday in Dhaka and was due to visit the Comilla district near Dhaka to see a project run by Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, one of the world's largest non-governmental groups.
Three Bangladeshi women would give an account of their lives freed from poverty through micro-credit, Quadir said.
"All three became paupers through various calamities but using money from micro-credit they became successful business people in their areas," Qadir said.