Annan says microcredit schemes are key to reaching global anti-poverty goals

Small loans provided to poor entrepreneurs are a valuable tool for fighting poverty and reaching global development goals, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today.

In a message to a meeting in New York convened five years after an international summit on microcredit, the Secretary-General noted that since then, nations of the world have set the target of cutting in 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," he said.

The Secretary-General pointed out that the global push launched in 1997 to highlight the wide-ranging benefits of microcredit has seen much progress. Grassroots community organizations and the financial services sector are working more and more closely together, "creating partnerships that provide the financial services the very poor require to work their way out of poverty and move towards self-reliance, while ensuring that successes and failures are quantified," he said.

"The phenomenal growth in the number of microcredit beneficiaries represents the combined achievements of thousands of innovative institutions around the world, and tens of thousands of their dedicated staff," Mr. Annan said in the message, which message was delivered by Anwarul K. Chowdhury, his High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States.