PKSF, in collaboration with the Microcredit Summit Campaign, is organizing the Asia Pacific Region Microcredit Summit Meeting of Councils 2004, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on February 16-19, 2004. Field visits will be organised for those interested, to observe various microcredit programs on 14 and 15 February 2004.

Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia has given her kind consent to inaugurate the Summit Meeting.

The Microcredti Summit Campaign, having its office in Washington DC, USA, began a nine year campaign in 1997, with the objective of reaching 100 million poor families around the world. The campaign has successfully organized three regional meetings in Harare, Zimbabwe(October, 2000); New Delhi, India (February,2001) and Puebla, Mexico (October, 2001).

Eight hundred microcredit experts, professionals and practitioners from home and abroad are expected to attend the forthcoming Summit in Dhaka.

The core themes of the Summit Meeting are-

• Reaching 100 million poor people with microcredit by 2005
• Reaching and empowering women through microcredit
• Building sustainable microfinance institutions
• Ensuring a measurable impact on the lives of the clients and their families

The Summit will also enable participants to exchange opinion, to share ideas, to promote best practices in the microcredit sector, to learn from each other and to work towards achieving the Millenium Development Goals of cutting absolute poverty in half by 2015.