Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) will host the Asia-Pacific Regional Micro-credit summit here in partnership with Micro-credit Summit Campaign from March 4-6, 2008.
PPAF sources told APP that the core themes of the micro-credit summit are reaching the poorest, empowering women, building financially self-sufficient institutions and ensuring a positive and measurable impact on the lives of the poor and their families.
They said it will bring together micro-credit practitioners, advocates, donor agencies, heads of international financial institutions, non-governmental organisations and others involved with micro-credit from around the globe to promote best practices in the field to stimulate exchanging of knowledge and facilitate work towards reaching the goals of poverty alleviation in the world. Micro-credit programmes offer a combination of services and resources to the poor including savings facilities and training, which allow families to work to end their own poverty, they remarked.
They added originally launched in 1997, the Micro-credit Summit Campaign is committed to reaching 175 million of the world's poorest families with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services, ensuring 100 million families rise above the one dollar a day threshold and lifting half a billion people out of extreme poverty by 2015. Currently, around 1.2 billion people (roughly 240 million families) are living on less than one dollar a day.
PPAF partners have the largest share of over 50 percent of the total market in micro-finance services to the poor and marginalised communities across the country. PPAF has so far disbursed Rs 15.53 billion among the poor to help them carve out their future.
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