[Canada] Miracles by microcredit

from The Chronicle Herald

Summit delegates say small loans key to ending global poverty
By CLARE MELLOR Business Reporter

A Nobel Peace Prize winner, the queen of Spain and dignitaries from across the globe are coming to Halifax, all because of a retiree from Charlottetown.

Bill Campbell, a volunteer working to end global poverty, is the man behind bringing the Global Microcredit Summit to Halifax.

The event starts Sunday, with more than 2,000 people from more than 100 countries expected to attend.

Participants include Queen Sofia of Spain and Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus who, along with the Grameen Bank, was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for tackling poverty with microcredit.

Microcredit involves small, unsecured loans with a reasonable interest rate, that allow people to start generating an income.

"I’ve been amazingly successful in bringing the thing here to Canada. It is more good luck than good management in my mind," said Mr. Campbell, 61, who volunteers with Results Canada, a grassroots advocacy group that lobbies governments to end world hunger.

"It’s an incredible kind of a story. I can’t take all the credit . . . Everyone who gave me a penny even, that is what made this possible."

A retired teacher and federal civil servant, Mr. Campbell has attended several global microcredit summits and organized several microcredit meetings in Atlantic Canada.

While attending a global microcredit summit in New York, Mr. Campbell questioned organizers why the annual summit had never been held in Canada.

"They just said ‘You never asked.’ "

The rest is history.

With a push from Jean-Guy Poirier, a manager of business development with the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Mr. Campbell put in a formal proposal to the bring the summit to Halifax and began raising the $3.3 million required from corporations and government agencies.

"They had big plans to go to Spain or Egypt . . . before I knew it they were coming to Halifax to have a look to see if it was possible."

The summit, a project of Results Educational Fund, a U.S. advocacy group, has been held annually since 1997. Participants expect to reach 100 million of the world’s poorest families with microcredit by the end of this year.

The small loans, often targeted at women, have enabled those in developing countries to start small business ventures and become self-sufficient. Some industrialized countries are now adopting the same microcredit models.

Mr. Campbell began researching microcredit years ago and quickly became fascinated with its potential for ending poverty in the Third World and addressing the problem of high unemployment in areas of Atlantic Canada.

"There are about two billion people on the planet who live in what we call the informal economy. They live on less than one or two dollars a day. These people have no hope at all. All the economic development policies of the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and organizations like that, they are all policies that are targeted to the formal economy," Mr. Campbell said in an interview.

"I saw microcredit actually going into the informal economy and touching the lives of these people and creating miracles in their lives just by a small, little loan that would give them enough money to buy the material to make a bamboo basket or some kind of an artifact or craft."

Mr. Campbell said he really wanted Charlottetown to host the summit, but the number of attendees meant it was logistically impossible.

"He wanted the summit to come to Canada and basically chased it," says Jeff Turner of Destination Halifax, a public-rivate partnership that recently gave Mr. Campbell an Ambassador Club award for bringing the conference to Halifax.

The conference is expected to generate several million dollars in economic spinoffs for the city.

Michael Hayes, an account manager with ACOA, describes Mr. Campbell as the champion of the summit.

"He got the interest going. He also went cap in hand to many corporations."

The summit received $500,000 from ACOA and $250,000 each from the province and the Canadian International Development Agency. Other agencies and corporations have also contributed.

However, just a couple days before the summit, Mr. Campbell was on the phone still trying to raise funds.

"I’ve got a lot of balls in the air and I’m trying to bring them all in," he said.

"We are about $200,000 short of our $3.3-million budget. A lot of that money goes toward making it easier for these brilliant lenders in the Third World to get here. The value of their currency would prohibit them from actually coming to such a summit. What we try to do is raise about $3,000 to facilitate their airfare and lodging."

While some microcredit projects are taking flight in the Atlantic provinces through co-operatives and credit unions, Mr. Campbell hopes the summit will serve as a "lightning rod" for the creation of more small-loan programs in this region.

"More and more people are looking at it," he said.

"Could this (microcredit) be the little miracle worker for Atlantic Canada?"