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 Business News | April 2005 
Queen, Fox, Address Microcredit At Conference
 El Universal
| | Queen Sofia of Spain chats with President Vicente Fox at a conference on microcredits in Mexico City on Monday (Photo: Ernesto Muñoz/El Universal) |
Awarding credit to potential small business owners who would not qualify through traditional banking avenues is an efficient tool for combating extreme poverty in Latin America and the entire world, Spain's Queen Sofia said during a microcredit conference here Monday.
In a little more than two decades, microcredits "have changed from being an activity perceived as marginal ... to a key element for development," said the queen, who has promoted the issue in other countries as well.
The encouragement of microcredits is a basic strategy in Spain, where since 1999, the government has granted 350,000 small loans totaling US300 million, the queen said.
During the Microfinance and Development conference, President Vicente Fox said microcredits have reduced the percentage of Mexico's population living in extreme poverty defined here as income of less than US1 a day from 10.5 percent in 1990 to 4.1 percent in 2004. Fox said his government has awarded 1.3 million microcredits.
The U.N. representative to Mexico, Thierry Lemaresquier, said microcredits "occupy a fundamental and central role in achieving the Millennium objectives, especially the goal of reducing extreme poverty."
The U.N. Millennium Goals call for reducing by half the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world; ensuring that all children have an elementary school education; providing people everywhere with access to safe drinking water; and halting the HIV/AIDS epidemic all by 2015.
Making microcredits available is "not charity, it's good business, and Latin America is a good example of this phenomenon," Lemaresquier said. |
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