Giving Credit

Photograph by Denise Hughes

Next month, nonprofit leaders and government officials from around the world will gather in New York to exchange ideas about so-called microcredit programs, which provide small loans and other financial services to help poor people, mostly women, start businesses or establish savings accounts.

An estimated 3,000 delegates, including Mexican President Vicente Fox and U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, plan to attend the three-day Microcredit Summit +5. The Microcredit Summit Campaign, a project of the Results Educational Fund, in Washington, is organizing the event with $350,000 from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Monsanto Fund, and the Citigroup Foundation.

The campaign held its first gathering five years ago in Washington with representatives from 137 countries. During the event, leaders of nonprofit groups that run microcredit programs pledged that by 2005 they would provide loans to 100 million people who live on less than $1 a day. At next month’s meeting, the campaign will release State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2002, which charts the microcredit programs’ progress. Current information about the effort won’t be released until the meeting, but by last year, about 19 million people had received loans, said a spokeswoman for the campaign.

In addition to issuing the report, officials from the Microcredit Summit Campaign plan to use the event to press foundations to do more to support microcredit programs, and governments to include microcredit programs in their efforts to fight poverty.

Here, members of the Puebla Banking Group, in Mexico, continue a family tradition of making and selling ceramic pottery with help from small loans from the Foundation for International Community Assistance. The loans enabled the group to buy a kiln to fire the ceramics. Previously, members of the group had to transport the pottery to another town to be fired. They plan to use future loans to purchase sewing machines to diversify their businesses.