Posted By: Janine Delacroix

by Justin ColeFri Nov 10, 9:48 AM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - What do Bill Gates, Queen Sofia of Spain, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and billionaire philanthropist George Soros all have in common?if (window.yzq_a == null) document.write("");if (window.yzq_a)
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They all believe that small business loans known as microcredit can help lift tens of millions of the world's poorest people, who mainly live across Asia, out of poverty and turn them into budding entrepreneurs.

Queen Sofia and Yunus will join several thousand delegates in Halifax, Canada, who are jetting in from around the world to attend the second Global Microcredit Summit from November 12-15.

Campaigners, including Yunus, who has been dubbed the "godfather" of microcredit, will announce their lofty goal of advancing tiny business loans to 175 million of the world's most impoverished people by 2015 at the summit.

Summit-backers conceded last week that they had failed to meet a goal set in Washington in 1997 to advance microcredit to 100 million poverty-stricken people by the end of 2005, but said they were well on track to hit that target by the end of this year.

"The summit and its new goals for 2015 to be launched in Halifax will help slash global poverty and kickstart progress toward the UNs Millennium Development Goals," Sam Daley-Harris, a director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, said Thursday.

The Millennium Development Goals have a deadline of 2015 for a range of measures including the halving of extreme poverty, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and boosting universal primary education.

Interest in microcredit, which is largely granted to people trying to survive on less than one dollar a day to start or expand small businesses, has mounted since Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize in mid-October.

French football star Zinedine Zidane visited Bangladesh this week at Yunus's invitation to help launch a food company jointly owned by French food giant Danone and Yunus's Grameen bank.

The 66-year-old Bangladeshi economist, who is also known as the "banker to the poor," is a microcredit pioneer and founder of the Grameen bank which has extended microloans to 6.6 million people since 1976.

Critics have questioned some of the microcredit campaign's claims and charge that some loans carry high interest rates, but the sector's growth has hit the radar screens of large international banks.

Big banks, which have historically shunned the world's poorest individuals, such as Dutch banking giant ING and US titan Citigroup, are rapidly setting up "microfinance" operations.

Robert Annibale, a global director for Citigroup's Microfinance Group, and ING microfinance specialist Gera Voorrips are both due to attend the Halifax summit.

Wider corporate interest has also increased: US giants Monsanto and Johnson and Johnson are helping sponsor the summit.

Government officials from around the world, particularly from developing nations, as well as credit union managers will also be travelling to Halifax.

Grameen Foundation chief executive Alex Counts told reporters last week that campaigners want to break a "generational cycle of poverty," but activists stress that tiny loans are not a magic "panacea" for wiping out poverty.

They view microcredit as a powerful tool for empowering often illiterate people who want to expand a food or handicraft-selling business, but acknowledge that the impoverished also need education and healthcare.

Campaigners point out that the microloans, which average around 100 dollars, require no collateral and say they focus on advancing loans to women because they are more responsible at running a family's finances.

Experts estimate there are between 1.0 to 1.2 billion people around the world who live on less than one dollar a day.

Gates and Soros are not attending the summit, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced grants totalling 8.7 million dollars to credit union groups working in Africa and Latin America earlier this month.

Soros is a co-chair of the microcredit campaign's executive committee along with Yunus.

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