SME

Latin America/Caribbean Region
Microcredit Summit Meeting of Council
"Diego Portales Convention Center"
Santiago de Chile, 19 and 22 April, 2005

Background: What is the Microcredit Summit Campaign?

The first Microcredit Summit was held February 2-4, 1997. More than 2,900 people from 137 countries gathered in Washington, D.C. to participate at the Summit. It was the largest microfinance gathering that had ever yet been organized , and both leaders of the microfinance industry and Heads of State participated. This Summit launched a nine-year campaign with the defined goal of “[w]orking to ensure that 100 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 year 2005.”

Three years later, at the United Nations Millenium Summit in September 2000, more than 180 Heads of State and of government agreed, for the first time in history and at the highest political levels, on the chief factors needed to accelerate human progress. At the center of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) is the reduction in half of global poverty by the year 2015, reducing the number of the poorest in the world from 1.2 billion to 600 million. The key development challenge which the nations of the world face is with regards to how to make this goal completely operational; taking it beyond the usual lofty rhetoric and entering into the reality of changing people’s lives on a massive scale.

Before the launch of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, a major development strategy focused on the poorest people in the world did not exist, and a strategy had not been conceived of how to truly make an impact at a global level. The truth is that it was common for the development experts to set aside the poorest, saying that they were too difficult to reach. For this reason, many efforts were made to reach out to the “poor”, but not to the poorest. Now many people concerned with development recognize that we have a responsibility to give the poorest an opportunity to rise out of absolute poverty. This ought to be a critical test not only of development, but of any global desire to act morally.

The Microcredit Summit Campaign brings together microcredit practitioners, advocates, educational institutions, donor agencies, NGOs, and other groups involved with microcredit, in order to promote best practices in the field, to learn from each other, and to work towards the goals of the Summit.

What are the core themes of the Microcredit Summit Campaign?

The core themes of the Microcredit Summit Campaign are:

- Reaching the poorest
- Reaching and empowering women
- Building financially self-sufficient institutions
- Ensuring a positive, measurable impact on the lives of the clients and their families

Objectives of the April 2005 Microcredit Summit in Santiago

The Santiago Summit will provide an opportunity to discuss and expand on the chief advantages which microcredit offers as an instrument of economic development in the Latin America/Caribbean region. It will seek:

- To energize efforts in the region to achieve the Microcredit Summit Campaign's goal
· To strengthen the concept of microcredit as a tool for economic development that favors the poor.
· To be a forum for the interchange of experiences between institutions working with microcredit in Latin America and the Caribbean.
· To motivate and highlight the efforts of public servants, bank workers, microfinance practitioners, and –in general- all those whose work is related to microcredit.
· To sensitize authorities, entrepreneurs, and society as a whole to give support to microcredit initiatives.

To access the agenda: http://www.cumbremicrocredito.cl/ingles/PDF/ingles.pdf

More information: http://www.cumbremicrocredito.cl/ingles/index.htm

 

 

 

 

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