Elvia is 25. She is a single mother in Guatemala, a country where the non-governmental organization CARE reports that approximately 20 per cent of women under 18 become unwed mothers. Elvia comes from a large, poor family (11 brothers and sisters). She became pregnant at 19 and was abandoned by the baby's father. She later took loans from CARE and has created a sewing and chicken-raising business. With her mother, she sells 600 chickens every seven weeks. She vows to make sure her six-year-old daughter does not make the same mistakes she has made.

It was with women like Elvia in mind that more than 2,900 people from 137 countries gathered from 2 to 4 February 1997 at the Microcredit Summit in Washington, D.C. The delegates launched a nine-year campaign to reach 100 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by the year 2005.

Today, however, there is a risk of losing the opportunity of microcredit to unleash the pent-up potential of hundreds of millions of the world's poorest. The Microcredit Summit Campaign defines the poorest as the bottom half of those living below their nation's poverty line. Too many in microfinance argue for a focus on building financially self-sufficient institutions at the expense of reaching the poorest families. The Campaign and some leaders in the field are demonstrating that combining institutional financial self-sufficiency with reaching the poorest is achievable and urgently needed. The Microcredit Summit Council of UN agencies, which the UN Development Fund for Women co-chairs with the International Labour Organization, has supported the campaign since its inception. But until now, there has been no bilateral or multilateral donor agency training its partners in using cost-effective, practitioner-friendly poverty measurement tools that allow programmes to identify and reach the poorest women, nor is any training its partners in combining the goals of reaching the poorest families with building financially self-sufficient institutions. The time is ripe for change.

Since its launch, the Microcredit Summit Campaign has been working to disseminate the latest developments in the field of micro-finance, with a special focus on its four core themes: reaching the poorest; reaching and empowering women; building financially self-sufficient institutions; and ensuring a positive, measurable impact on the lives of clients and their families.

A survey of micro-finance programmes involved in the Campaign reveals that the 925 microcredit practitioners who reported to the Summit in 1999 are currently reaching 12.6 million poorest clients. It must be stressed that this is self-reported data; there is an insufficient number of inexpensive poverty measurements, and most institutions are not yet using such measurements. The Campaign is working with practitioners to identify and disseminate cost-effective poverty measurements. That said, this figure indicates a 56-per-cent increase in poorest clients reached over 1998. A 35-per-cent increase each year for the next seven years would put the project on track to reach 100 million of the poorest clients by 2005. Maintaining that level of increase will require: expanded use of best practices by microcredit practitioners around the world, including outreach to poorest families; programmes reaching more clients; easier access to funding for grass-roots groups; and a continued and dramatic increase in the num-ber of microcredit practitioners in the campaign, with a concomitant increase in the number of programmes reporting to the campaign.

The Campaign goals could be reached with greater speed with the full support of the United Nations. The United Nations Development Programme has launched Microstart -- a $41-million pilot global programme to build the capacity of local organizations to develop and enhance lending and savings services to micro-entrepreneurs, a solidarity-lending approach in lieu of traditional guarantees, with a special emphasis on women to support promising institutions which have the potential to become breakthrough organizations. The focus is based on the rationale that meeting the demand for micro-finance will require organizations with vision, commitment and capacity to develop sustainable microfinance operations. A breakthrough is defined as an organization that becomes a major service provider in its geographic area, attaining substantial independence from donors through financial viability and influencing other providers.

The United Nations must expand Microstart and further support the core themes of the Microcredit Summit Campaign. The Secretary-General had endorsed the Summit's goal to reach 100 million of the world's poorest households by 2005. "You can count on the UN to be there with you throughout this effort between now and the year 2005." That support is needed now more than ever, for Elvia, for 100 million of her sisters around the world, and for hundreds of millions of their sons and daughters.