What is the Microcredit Summit Campaign
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 our goal.
The core themes of the Microcredit Summit Campaign are:
- Reaching the poorest [Click here for more on this theme]
- Reaching and empowering women [Click here for more on this theme]
- Building financially self-sufficient institutions [Click here for more on this theme]
- Ensuring a positive, measurable impact on the lives of clients and their families [Click here for more on this theme]
The first global Microcredit Summit was held February 2-4, 1997. The second global summit was held in New York in 2002. The 2006 Summit was held in Halifax. between the global Summits are Regional Summits. For more information Click here
Gender and the MCS Campaign
Not only ‘reaching’ but also ‘empowering’ women has been the second theme of the Micro-credit Summit Campaign since 1997. At the 2002 New York Summit and some of the regional summits there were gender sessions and gender trainings sponsored by the Campaign itself and by UNIFEM. Gender issues are also discussed in some papers in other Sessions.
In the 2006 State of the Campaign Sam Daley Harris argues for the importance of women’s empowerment to achieving the Millenium Development goals and empowerment ‘at the centre of human progress’.
He concludes the same section with:
‘We must improve microfinance where it fails to live up to its promise, not write it off as a failed, over-hypes fad. What is also needed is a powerful vision for outreach and impact, a vision that is clearly laid out in bold goals’ (emphasis added).
However discussion of gender issues and women's empowerment at the 2006 Summit was more limited than previously. This is due to two converging factors:
Challenges of increasing commercialisation
Entrance of large players like commercial banks, potentials of new technologies which enable much more cost-effective delivery of tailored products, and continuing debates about the most appropriate balance between liberalisation and consumer protection in regulatory environments.There are indeed some very positive developments:
- potential for much bigger and more rapid expansion
- possibilities of a much greater range of products tailored to individual needs to increase contributions to livelihoods
- participatory market research tools for product development
- interest in consumer protection and financial literacy to protect clients against bad products
However there are some very worrying trends:
- the biggest players as they mature decrease the proportion of female clients.
Poverty reach and social performance
In 2006 the Campaign adopted two new goals to make the commitment to poverty reduction more concrete, and also in response to the 2003 USAID Poverty Mandate:
Working to ensure that 100 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
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.
Again the challenges of continually reaching downward to underserved groups, particularly in poorer rural areas have stimulated some very positive innovations:
- tools for assessing and measuring poverty reach
- indicators for social rating and monitoring social performance
- introduction of much more robust measures and staff incentives for poverty reach in organisations like Grameen Bank
- cost-effective integration of micro-finance with health and education in organisations like ProMujer and Bolivia
However again these measures are not necessarily gender sensitive:
- poverty assessment tools are based on a household measure which may exclude vulnerable women in households just around the poverty line
- gender issues may become swamped in the other requirements for social rating and performance assessment
- women's empowerment may become conflated with access to health education and girls education.
Ways forward
An associated session on gender at the Summit identified a number of critical dimensions of the way forward for gender mainstreaming within the campaign:
- development of a gender goal along the lines of the poverty goaosl above
- development of gender indicators which can be included in social rating and performance assessment
- a network for ongoing exchange of ideas for product, service and organisational innovation
- lobbying and advocacy of donor organisations
For further discussion on all these issues please join the genfinance Yahoo Discussion Group .
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