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Speech Excerpts from the Microcredit Summit +5

Plenary Session: Ensuring Impact

International Year of Microcredit

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Sam Daley-Harris, Director, Microcredit Summit Campaign

The Summit and the Microcredit Summit +5 is an effort to make sure that the microfinance field retains or even reclaims its heart. Yes families living on $2, $3, $4, $5 a day should have access to financial services, but families who live on less then a dollar a day must not be left out. This summit stands for those families. Yes institutions should move toward financial self-sufficiency. Both so clients are not paying the cost of inefficiencies and so that institution can continue to serve their current clients for years to come and many new clients. Yes women should be reached and empowered through microfinance. Both because they are the most subjugated and because transformation of their lives is the quickest route to the transformation of the lives of their families. Yes institution should be committed to a positive measurable impact on the lives of clients and their families for if there is no impact then there is little reason for this work. And yes donor agencies and leaders and others must have sustainable microfinance for the very poor as a central intervention in their policy papers on cutting absolute poverty in half, but they should also have sustainable microfinance for the very poor as a central part of their practice.

This summit stands with those leaders who have committed themselves, their government and their institutions to cutting absolute poverty in half by 2015. We are committed to their success and we see the need to say that your policy and your practice must fit your commitment if we are to succeed. If we do not know whether the work we do or the work we fund reaches people who live on less then dollar a day, then we don’t know whether our work contributes to cutting absolute poverty in half. If we do not know whether the families with whom we work or the institutions we fund are helping families move above a dollar a day, we can say our work contributes to cutting absolute poverty in half, but we won’t really know if that is so.

This evening we have released the State of Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2002. In it, 2,186 institutions reported that by the end of 2001 they were reaching 54.9 million families, 26.8 million of whom were among the poorest when they started. 211 of the largest institutions had their data verified by a third party. Those institutions were reaching 81% of the poorest families reported. To reach 100 million we need an annual growth of 38%. The current annual growth is 37%. We have come along way and we have a long way to go. With your partnership and with the partnership of many who are not with us in this room we will succeed.

Read remarks by Ted Turner