The 1999 Microcredit Summit Meeting of Councils

600 Delegates from Six Continents Gather at Summit Meeting of Councils

Six hundred delegates from 85 countries gathered in Abidjan, 

H.M. Sofia, Queen of Spain, and Prime Minister of Côte d'Ivoire Daniel Kablan Duncan opened the Microcredit Summit Meeting of Councils. One of four regional meetings where delegates engaged in a lively discussion about their region's contribution to reaching 100 million of the world's poorest families. An Ivoirian microentrepreneur displays her produce for sale.

Côte d'Ivoire, from June 24-26,1999, for the second follow-up meeting to the Microcredit Summit. The original Summit, held in February 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 1999 Meeting of Councils included H.M. Sofia, Queen of Spain, who is 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 was four papers commissioned for the meeting and six day-long courses. The papers, largely 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, are available in French, English, and Spanish at Participants have already committed to translating the papers into Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic.

In his opening remarks, Campaign Director Sam Daley-Harris recognized the progress being made in reaching and empowering women and in building financially self-sufficient institutions. “But where the breakthroughs are very limited,” 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. However, Labelle cautioned, “We have to be careful 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, warned that identifying the poorest was only the first step and that understanding which products were best for that group was also crucial. He opened his comments 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...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 Grameen Bank Managing Director 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 minister of finance insisted that they would name the head of the agency. Dr. Yunus and other microfinanciers said, ‘No,’ 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 by 2005. 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, USA; 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.

The Meeting of Councils in Abidjan also featured more than 100 private meetings with donors where microcredit practitioners began dialogues for future partnerships.

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 June 1998	14,808,871	8,127,504
929 programs reporting in June 1999	22,341,064	12,659,030

At the conclusion of his opening 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 is available. For further information contact info@microcreditsummit.org or fax 1-202-637-3566.