Thursday May 21, 06:36 PM
World poor have little access to microcredit: experts
MADRID (AFP) - The vast majority of the world's poor still have no access to microloans that have been hailed as a good way to eradicate poverty, experts said Thursday at an international conference in Madrid.
"More than 95 percent of the world's poor population remain far removed from any sort of financing," the chairman of the microfinance foundation of Spain's second-largest bank BBVA (Madrid: BBVA.MC - news) , Manuel Mendez del Rio Piovich, told the conference.
"In the world there are four billion people who are excluded from financing," he said, adding there was a huge gap between the potential demand for microcredits and the number of institutions that provide them.
Campaigners say microloans, which average 100 dollars (73 euros) and require no collateral, can help poor people expand a basic food or handicraft business and enable them to lift themselves out of poverty.
The benefits of microfinance for the poor were highlighted when microloan pioneer Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh won the Nobel peace prize in 2006.
Eight million people in Latin America and the Caribbean received 8.6 billion dollars in microcredits in 2007, the Inter-American Development Bank said.
"We are a young industry, we have to develop our presence," said Fouad Abdelmoumni, head of Al Amana, the largest microfinance institution in Morocco.
"We are not everywhere in the world, nor in all the regions of the countries where we are present," he said.
New technologies, like the Internet, are the key to making microcredit available in remote regions, he added.
Spain will host the next Global Microcredit Summit in 2011.
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