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Guest post by: Development Gateway Foundation Become an Author

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In 1997, RESULTS Educational Fund, a U.S.-based non-profit organization, organized the Microcredit Summit. The summit focused on catalyzing the international development community to recognize that scaling up microfinance was essential to reaching the Millennium Development Goals and creating a just world. The 1997 Summit provided something that was missing from the important UN summits of the 1990s- a compelling, measurable goal in the area of microfinance. At that Summit, delegates 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.

As of December 31, 2005, 3,133 microcredit1 institutions have reported reaching 113,261,390 clients, 81,949,036 of whom were among the poorest when they took their first loan. Of these poorest clients, 84.2 percent are women. Eight hundred forty-seven of these institutions submitted an Institutional Action Plan in 2006. Together these 847 institutions account for 88 percent of the poorest clients reported. Assuming five persons per family, the 81.9 million poorest clients reached by the end of 2005 affected some 410 million family members.

While considerably more than 100 million clients were reached with a microloan in 2005, the goal of reaching 100 million poorest was not achieved. In order to reach 100 million of the world's poorest families by the end of 2005, the Campaign required a 38.1 percent growth rate per year from its starting point of 7.6 million poorest families at the end of 1997. The Campaign's overall growth of 978 percent between 1997 and 2005 now averages just over 34 percent per year. As the goal was very nearly reached and in November of 2006 the Campaign was re-launched to 2015 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 families rise above the US$1 a day threshold adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), between 1990 and 2015.

The 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 stimulate the interchanging of knowledge, and to work towards reaching our goals.

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