Six hundred delegates from 85 countries gathered in Abidjan, Côte
d'Ivoire, on June 24-26, 1999, for the second follow-up meeting to the
Microcredit Summit. The original Summit held in 1997 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 year 2005.
Participants in this follow-up Meeting of Councils included Queen Sofia
of Spain, who is the Honorary Co-Chair of the Microcredit Summit
Campaign, and Michel Rocard, former Prime Minister of France who is Co-Chair
of the Summit's Council of Parliamentarians.
| The centerpiece of the 1999 Meeting of Councils
in Abidjan were four papers commissioned for the meeting and six day-long
courses. The papers focused on the Summit's four core themes of:
1) reaching the poorest 2) reaching women 3) building financially
self-sufficient institutions and 4) ensuring impact on the lives of clients
and their families. These papers are available from the Summit's
website in French, English, and Spanish at www.microcreditsummit.org.
Participants have already committed to translating the papers into Chinese,
Hindi, and Arabic. |
The Abidjan meeting recognized the progress that has already been made
in reaching and empowering women and in building financially self-sufficient
institutions. "But where the breakthroughs are very limited," Sam Daley-Harris
said, "and where the Microcredit Summit Campaign must excel if we are to
succeed, are breakthroughs in reaching the poorest, in ensuring impact,
and in combining institutional financial self-sufficiency with reaching
the poorest."
The first paper discussed at the opening plenary was titled "The
Microcredit Summit's Challenge: Working Toward Institutional Financial
Self-Sufficiency while Maintaining a Commitment to Serving the Poorest
Families. " In her opening comments, Canadian International Development
Agency President Huguette Labelle agreed that it is possible to target
the poorest and attain financial self-sufficiency. "We have to be
careful," Labelle cautioned, "that we give enough time for attainment of
self-sufficiency...[that institutions attain it] in such a way as to not
put an extremely difficult burden on the first borrowers, who are the very
poor."
In a discussion of the paper "Measuring Transformation: Assessing and
Improving the Impact of Microcredit," one delegate said that it might be
difficult to isolate the effect of microcredit activity. African Development
Bank Vice President Cyril Enweze answered, "...welcome to the real world.
Anybody who has done any form of measurement for anything grows into this
problem. Therefore I say, is this a reason why we should not start?
My answer is very simply no."
The paper titled "Overcoming the Obstacles of Identifying the Poorest
Families," discussed the use of proxy poverty measurements such as the
CASHPOR House Index and Participatory Wealth Ranking. David Wright,
Chief Enterprise Development Advisor for the Department for International
Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom opened by saying, "I largely agree
with the paper that's been presented...I think there's no question that
the sort of indicators, that are written about in the paper, which I agree
is an excellent paper, are a necessary way of proceeding. I
believe it is important to identify the poorest in order to be able to
target them. DFID, my agency from the U.K., has certainly been involved
in enough expensive exercises which don't use proxy methods of the sort
that you've illustrated in your paper, to know that it's quite impossible
to think of doing those on a larger scale. Proxy indicators are absolutely
essential."
World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin discussed the paper titled
"How
Donor Funds Could Better Reach and Support Grassroots Microcredit Institutions
Working Towards the Microcredit Summit's Goal and Core Themes."
In
the paper Muhammad Yunus calls for the creation of autonomous national
and sub-national microcredit funds. In discussing a $105 million
World Bank loan to the Bangladesh government for PKSF, Serageldin said,
"Autonomy wasn't easy...credit to PKSF was blocked for about seven or eight
months because the Ministry of Finance insisted that the government would
name the head of the agency. Dr. Yunus and other microfinanciers said,
‘No,' and insisted that the board had to name the CEO or else there would
be no autonomy...I am happy to say that the World Bank, in fact, sided
with the microfinanciers and as a result we do have PKSF and $105 million
went there. But there aren't many such examples. And the question
that is inherent in Dr. Yunus' proposal is, can such examples be created
and induced from the outside?"
At the Asia Regional meeting participants committed to reaching 75 million
poorest families. Participants from the Southern Africa Regional
Microcredit Summit committed to reaching 12 million poorest families in
that sub-region.
More than one dozen Institutional Action Plans were presented at the
Council Meetings, including microcredit practitioners ASA of Bangladesh
and Nygesigiso of Mali. Other Councils heard presentations by Harvard
School of Housing and Urban Design; HIVOS, Zimbabwe; Canadian International
Development Agency (CIDA); Asian Development Bank; Southern Africa Regional
Microcredit Summit; Grameen Foundation USA; Finadev, Benin; PriceWaterhouse
Coopers, Kenya; UNDP; UNICEF; FONCAP, Argentina; and Employment and Training
Foundation - Local Initiatives Departments, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Microcredit Summit Campaign reports released in June 1998 and June 1999
reflect the following growth in clients reached:
|
Total Clients |
Poorest Clients |
| 622 programs reporting in 6/98 |
14,808,871 |
8,127,504 |
| 929 programs reporting in 6/99 |
22,341,064 |
12,659,030 |
At the conclusion of his remarks, Campaign Director Sam Daley-Harris
said, "We are here to think what we've never thought, say what we've never
said, write what we've never written, to plan what we've never planned,
in order to do what we've never done to end abject poverty on the planet."
The Meeting of Councils final report will be available in September
1999.
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