Organization Profile & Updates

Services
The Microcredit Summit (MCS) is an umbrella organization that supports activities to share best practices among microfinance institutions (MFIs) throughout the world. These activities include summits, regional conferences, publications, research, and data collection. They receive data from MFIs involved with them in order to obtain cumulative data on the microcredit industry itself. The MCS is the first clearinghouse for all MFI reports and information worldwide.

MFIs that reported to the Microcredit Summit-Summer 2003:

919       Africa
1,603     Asia
261       Latin America and the Caribbean
48        North America
70        Europe and the Newly Independent States
30        Middle East
2,931     Total Institutions

• These 2,931 institutions represent 80,868,343 clients with a current loan.
  (For a complete list of institutions, please see the State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2004.)
• Percentage of clients who are women
  82.5 percent (45.2 million)
• Percentage of clients who are "poorest of the poor"
  68 percent (54.8 million)

The core themes of the Campaign are:

• Reaching the poorest
• Reaching and empowering women
• Building financially self-sufficient institutions
• Ensuring a positive, measurable impact on the lives of clients and their families

The Summit acts as an information source for practitioners to gain expertise. They offer best-practice guides based on Summit Sessions where leaders in microcredit, government, business, banking, and the non-profit sector participate as panelists.

The following guides are available for free on the Microcredit Summit Campaign website:

• Ensuring Loan Repayment
• Moving Toward Institutional Sustainability
• Targeting the Poorest and Covering the Costs
• Sustainability in Industrialized Countries
• Empowering Women
• Summit Campaign Establishes Poverty Measurement Tool Kit
• Measuring Impact on the Lives of Clients
• Mobilizing Savings and Ensuring Their Safe Use
• Recruiting, Training, and Retaining Excellent Staff

These guides are offered to practitioners, government leaders, bankers, or anyone who is interested in learning more about microcredit.

The Microcredit Summit Story
The Microcredit Summit Campaign was founded by Sam Daley-Harris as a project of the RESULTS Education Fund. The RESULTS organization had been focusing on microcredit as one of its favored tools for eradicating poverty and its accompanying complications. In the 1990s as microcredit initiatives grew around the world Daley-Harris and associates recognized the need to provide a venue for all MFIs around the world to share and collaborate better.

The Microcredit Summit was held February 2-4, 1997. At the Summit more than 2,900 people from 137 countries gathered in Washington, DC. 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. The Microcredit Summit Campaign brings together microcredit practitioners, advocates, educational institutions, donor agencies, international financial institutions, non-governmental organizations, and others involved with microcredit to promote best practices in the field, to learn from each other, and to work towards reaching the Summit goal.

In November of 2002, more than 2000 delegates from 100 countries gathered at the Microcredit Summit +5 in New York City. The Microcredit Summit offered an opportunity for microcredit practitioners, advocates, donors, and others committed to the Summit's goal to assess progress, identify challenges, and reaffirm their commitment to the nine-year campaign (1997-2005). They came out of the Summit with a commitment to the goal set in 1997 to reach 100 million of the world's poorest families.

The Global Microcredit Summit 2006 will be held from November 12-15, 2006 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. A second phase of the campaign will be kicked off that event with two new goals:

1. Working to ensure that 175 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women of those families, are receiving credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by the end of 2015.
2. Working to ensure that 100 million of the world's poorest families move from below US$1 a day adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) to above US$1 a day adjusted for PPP by the end of 2015.