Advocate for Microfinance at the 2009 World Economic Forum

In January, the world's economic leaders will gather for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2009 to discuss the current financial crisis and ways to mitigate its effects. This conference is a powerful opportunity to advocate for the needs of those most hard hit by this situation -- the global poor.

To this end, we are pressing the Forum's Co-Chairs to promote and prioritize microfinance at the conference through their speeches and sessions.

Microfinance gives the world's poor the tools and resources they need to work their way out of poverty and improve their lives. But more can be done -- to ensure that microfinance reaches the estimated 500 million more people who could benefit from it.

Times of crisis are also times of remarkable potential for change. Please join us in urging the Co-Chairs to advance the benefits of financial inclusion for the world's poor.

As leaders of the world's largest banks and businesses, I urge you to support microfinance as a powerful 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 working poor.
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