$100 Of Hope... And A New Life

Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, Queen Sofia of Spain and hundreds of campaigners met for a summit here in Halifax, Canada last week where they announced their lofty goal of attempting to lift 175 million of the world’s poorest people out of poverty by 2015.

Campaigners at the second Global Microcredit Summit, which was held in the east coast Canadian city between November 12-15, said the use of tiny business loans known as microcredit had already helped lift tens of millions of people out of poverty and improve their livelihoods.

About 2,000 delegates, including UN officials and microcredit specialists, have traveled to Halifax from some 100 countries around the world to attend the summit.

Campaigners say microloans, which average $100 and require no collateral, can help the critically poor expand a basic food-selling or handicraft-marketing business and enable them to lift themselves out of poverty.

"Today we are already 100 million, so it’s not even double the size, so that way it’s not the same challenge. We have created the momentum already," Yunus, of Bangladesh, told AFP on the sidelines of the summit.

Yunus, who was awarded the Nobel prize last month for his decades-long work in advancing microcredit, was referring to a target set in Washington in 1997 to advance microloans to 100 million poverty-stricken people by the end of 2005.

Campaigners concede they are not there yet, but say they are on track to reach that goal by the end of this year, and are now setting their sights wider.

The Nobel peace laureate said he envisages a world where future generations would have to go to "poverty museums" to discover what poverty was.

"It’s not the money that’s the important thing, it’s the will that’s the important thing," Yunus, who is known as the "godfather" of microcredit, added.

Interest in microcredit, which is largely granted to people vying to survive on less than one dollar a day to start or expand small businesses, has mounted since Yunus won the peace prize in mid-October.

Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh to oversee tiny business loan lending and the bank has extended microloans to 6.6 million people since 1976.

Queen Sofia, who has long been an advocate for microcredit, attended the summit sporting a cloth wrap over her left shoulder that she had purchased from a group of women in Yunus’s native Bangladesh for 120 cents.

Fresh pledges of cash were announced Sunday to support the growing movement.

Peter MacKay, Canada’s foreign minister, announced to delegates that his government had approved over $40 million for different microfinance projects that would be targeted at projects in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

"Around the world, the power of microfinance is transforming lives," MacKay said.

"Canada’s new government is a leader in microfinancing in Afghanistan, which is part of our efforts to foster self reliance," he added.

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya announced that his government was appropriating some $50 million to advance microcredit schemes in his country.

Although delegates were upbeat at the summit’s opening ceremony, the enormity of the global challenge facing the microcredit community is daunting.

Experts estimate there are between 1.0 and 1.2 billion people around the world, mainly in Asia, who live on less than one dollar a day.

Ministers and delegates pointed out that microcredit alone is not a magic "panacea" for eradicating world poverty, but said it can be a very powerful anti-poverty tool when linked to better education and improved healthcare. –AFP