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In January, the world's economic leaders will gather at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting 2009 to discuss the current financial crisis. This meeting is a powerful opportunity to advocate for those hardest hit by the crisis -- the 3+ billion people around the world currently living on less than $2 a day.
Microfinance provides the world’s poor with the tools and resources they need to permanently lift themselves and their families out of poverty. But there is an urgent need to expand these services as microfinance is currently reaching only 10-20% of the estimated 500 million poor entrepreneurs who would benefit from it.
Please join us in contacting the Forum's Co-Chairs by January 21st, to urge them to promote and prioritize microfinance at the upcoming conference and help eradicate poverty.
Please fill out the fields below to sign the petition to the WEF Co-Chairs today.
As leaders of the world's largest banks and businesses, I urge you to support microfinance as a sustainable and scalable solution for eradicating global poverty.
At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2009, "Shaping the Post-Crisis World," I urge you to promote microfinance in the Forum's opening remarks and prioritize it in the Forum's programmatic track, "Addressing the Challenges of Sustainability and Development." As a co-chair, you have the power to educate the nearly 2,500 attendees about the power of microfinance as a sustainable development tool and engage them in discussing the best approaches to rapidly expanding and protecting access to it.
Specifically, I ask you to highlight the following key financial inclusion initiatives:
1. Build microfinance programs in underserved markets -- using innovative practices and technology -- to financially empower the working poor. Together we must find and fund solutions that will allow us to reach, in the next 10 years, the estimated 500 million poor entrepreneurs who could benefit from microfinance, and not merely the 10 to 20 percent of those it reaches today.
2. Broaden the range of financial services available to the poor. Microfinance institutions must move beyond credit, to provide the working poor with all the basic tools the rest of us now take for granted, including savings accounts, insurance, remittances, and business and financial training.
3. Protect low-income entrepreneurs. We must continue to uphold consumer protection through such best practices as quality services, transparency, appropriate pricing and debt collection, and maintaining the privacy of customer information.
In response to the economic crisis, I recognize that the World Economic Forum seeks to "fundamentally reboot" the way the global economy operates. To this end, I thank you for leveraging your power as world leaders to advance the benefits of microfinance for the world's poor.
Sincerely,
Your Name and Your Address here