More than 106 million of the world's families living in extreme poverty received micro loans in 2007 to start or expand a range of tiny businesses to remote villages, surpassing a goal set ten years earlier, according to a Microcredit Summit Campaign report released on Monday.
As the world's financial markets are gripped by a global economic crisis, this quiet revolution in microbanking has spread to the most destitute corners of the world. Microcredit is an effective way to help the poor find a dignified route out of poverty with a payback rates that traditional banks would envy.
Organisers said that when the goal was originally set in 1997, fewer than 8 million poor clients had a microloan. That number has grown by more than 1,300 percent between 1997-2007.
In 2007, microloans went to 88 million poor women. The Microcredit Summit Campaign 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 1 billion people living on less than $1.00 a day.
The amount of microloans in hands of the poor has expanded from an estimated $1 billion to $15 billion, demonstrating significant leverage possible when an international campaign is able to mobilise millions of people and institutions on a global scale.
Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) is the preferred partner of Campaign in Pakistan. Since 2000, PPAF cumulative disbursements stand at $887 million whereas disbursements for Microcredit stand at $484 million. It has partnered with 75 organisations working in over 39,000 villages with more than 120,000 communities and groups networking at grassroots level in 120 districts across the country.
The PPAF's cumulative operational activities entail over 2.4 million microcredit loans (impacting 13.8 million with 45 percent women beneficiaries and 100 percent recovery rate), over 16,000 water and infrastructure projects completed (impacting 9.5 million with 50 percent women beneficiaries) and 162 health and educational facilities and 328,000 trained individuals, staff and communities (42 percent women).
The Microcredit Summit Campaign is a project of the RESULTS Educational Fund, a US based grassroots advocacy organisation committed to ending hunger and poverty. The Microcredit Summit brings together microcredit practitioners from around the globe. It advocates, donor agencies, heads of international financial institutions, non-governmental organisations and others involved with microcredit to promote best practices in the field to stimulate the inter-changing of knowledge and to work towards reaching the goals of poverty alleviation in the world.-PR