New Report Shows: Millions More People Are Working Their Way Out of Poverty with Microcredit

10/31/2003

From: Denise Hughes of the Media to End Poverty and Social Injustice, 202-321-8923

News Advisory:

WHO:

Please join Grameen Bank Managing Director, Prof. Muhammad Yunus; UN Undersecretary General and High Commissioner for Least Developed Countries, Anwarul K. Chowdhury; and Microcredit Summit Campaign Director, Sam Daley-Harris, for the release of The State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, Report 2003.

Other invited speakers include Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan; Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.); businessman and philanthropist, Ted Turner; Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Director of UNIFEM; and Marc Malloch Brown, Administrator of UNDP. The Report will assess the state of microfinance worldwide and include data on the Summit's progress towards its goal of reaching 100 million of the world's poorest families by 2005.

WHAT:

Release of the State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2003

WHEN:

Monday, Nov. 3, 1 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.

(12:30 p.m. - 1 p.m. PRESS SIGN IN) To ensure entry, please R.S.V.P. in advance to: Denise Hughes at: 202-321-8923, or nomorepoor@adelphia.net

WHERE:

Dag Hammerskold Library Auditorium, UNITED NATIONS, New York City -- Use the visitor's entrance: 1st Ave. and 45th Street

WHY:

Twenty percent of the people who live in our world exist on less than a dollar a day. Each day 29,000 children die from preventable malnutrition and diseases. That's the number of Americans that live in Ithaca, New York, or Leesburg, Virginia. Can you imagine the headlines if 29,000 people suddenly died in any city in America? For 29,000 Mother's around the world-each day is a headline. It doesn't have to be this way. While many institutions like the World Bank and others have been struggling to reduce poverty over the last 50 years not one has succeeded. Poverty rates around the world are at deplorable levels, but there is hope...Microcredit is a new method that reduces poverty every day. In his extensive research for the World Bank of BRAC, Grameen Bank and RD-12, three microcredit programs in Bangladesh, Shahidur Khandkur said, "as much as 5 percent of program-participating households should be able to lift their families out of poverty every year by borrowing from a microcredit program." Based on Khandker's research this would mean that more than one million family members should be able to move out of poverty each year as a result of borrowing from these two programs, or some 87,500 people per month. All institutions reporting to the Microcredit Summit from Bangladesh are reaching 10.5 million poorest or some 52.5 million family members. If the statistics for Grameen and BRAC were to hold true for these institutions and family members, that would mean that 2.625 million Bangldeshis should be moving out of poverty each year or some 219,000 people per month. This research shows that Microcredit programs can have a macroeconomic impact in countries throughout the world.

UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan has said, "Now that the nations of the world have committed themselves to reduce by half by the year 2015 the number of people living on less than $1 a day, we must look even more seriously at the pivotal role that sustainable microfinance can play and is playing in reaching this Millennium Development Goal."

http://www.microcreditsummit.org