Author(s):
Sam Daley-Harris

Outside her one-room shack, Ana Ruiz’s hands make a rhythmic beat as she presses corn dough into thin circles. She cooks four tortillas at a time on a griddle over an open wood fire while shouting out a list of chores to her daughter and slapping a toddler’s little hand away from the hot griddle. Like most busy mothers, Ana seems to have four hands.

She got up before dawn to take her corn to the miller to be ground into flour and rushed right home to get her children off to school. She will make one hundred tortillas by 10 a.m. for her six regular customers. After that she will make 250 more tortillas, which she and her children will sell on the street.

Ana is repaying her second loan of $100, borrowed from Opportunity International’s affiliate in Nicaragua. She buys corn in bulk and pays wholesale instead of retail prices for the first time in her life. She and her eight children still live in a scrap wood shack held together by barbed wire, but the loan has increased her income enough to make small but important improvements in their life. Before her loan, their only furniture was the table where she works. Now, she has eight plastic chairs so her children will not have to sit on the dirt. The children had never owned a pair of shoes or attended school, but now the four oldest ones have shoes and are enrolled in school. The school fee is only 25 cents per month, per child, but she never had enough to send even one child.

Ana says the biggest improvement has been in their nutrition. She and her children were constantly malnourished and listless. “The little ones run around now,” she says. “They go to sleep early because they are tired from playing, not because they are weak.”
-Povertyfighters.com

Inspired by women like Ana Ruiz and in response to the plight of millions of very poor women without access to financial services, more than 2,900 people from 137 countries gathered from February 2-4, 1997, at the Microcredit Summit in Washington, DC. At the Summit they 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.

At the center of the Summit’s Declaration and Plan of Action were four core themes: 1) reaching the poorest, 2) reaching and empowering women, 3) building financially self-sufficient institutions, and 4) ensuring a positive measurable impact on the lives of clients and their families.

As of December 31, 2000, 1,567 microcredit institutions reported reaching 30,681,107 clients,
19,327,451 of whom were among the poorest when they took their first loan. Eight hundred twenty-seven institutions submitted a 2001 Institutional Action Plan outlining their progress within these four core themes. Assuming five persons per family, the 19.3 million poorest clients reached by the end of 2000 affected more than 95 million family members.

In order to reach 100 million poorest by 2005, the Campaign will need to have a 38% growth rate per year from its starting point of 7.6 million poorest families at the end of 1997. The growth from 13.8 million poorest clients at the end of 1999 to 19.3 million poorest clients at the end of 2000 represents a 40 percent growth over last year. Currently the growth rate averages just under 37 percent a year, one percentage point below the rate required.

This year, the Campaign was able to verify data from 138 institutions, representing 12,752,645 poorest families or 66 percent of the total poorest reported. This is a 76 percent increase in the number of institutions verified last year. A complete appendix of these institutions can be found on page 14.

At the time of the 1997 Microcredit Summit, progress toward the Summit’s goal was impeded by a set of conventional wisdoms that questioned several of our core themes and challenged the pillars of the Campaign. Over the past four years, the Microcredit Summit Campaign has made significant progress in answering these challenges. In the last year, several new developments show that the conventional wisdom is changing. This report will review our work in changing the conventional wisdom, outline the survey methodology used for this report, present the findings, and summarize our work in verifying the data of an ever larger number of institutions.