The Micah Challenge

International Year of Microcredit

I used to be very wary of signing petitions and I still am these days, to a certain degree, except that ‘wariness’ has been replaced by ‘discerning’. And I am glad to say I am definitely far less paranoid about Big Brother tracking me down and imprisoning me for being a left-wing dissident today than, say, during my teenage years with memories of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and the Thought Police hanging over my head.

Around the final year of my university course, a few months before my 21st, my attitude towards signing petitions began to change. One particular campaign caught my attention and it challenged me to get off my arse and do something practical instead of blowing hot air. It was the Jubilee 2000 campaign. This campaign basically urged rich countries to cancel or drop the debt owed to them by Third World countries as means of enabling these countries to break out of the poverty/debt cycle.

I am hardly an extrovert and so, I felt I could perhaps support the cause by simply collecting signatures using the Jubilee 2000 campaign petition forms. Needless to say, thrusting forms to strangers on the street and soliciting support from passers-by hardly seemed appealing to me. And so, one day, I found myself raising the idea of that campaign to two uni friends at a tram stop near the university while we were waiting for our tram. To my surprise, the two of them both thought that it was an excellent idea and said they’d readily sign such a petition. And needless to say, the rest is history with many more people – and many of you reading this – signing that petition throughout the rest of 1999.

All in all, 24 million signatures were collected worldwide at the end of the campaign, Third World debt got pushed onto the global political agenda and many First World countries committed themselves to writing off nearly $100 billion of debt owed to them by the poorer countries. Tanzania, for example, thanks to debt cancellation, was able to abolish school fees and enroll an additional one million children for primary school education. (Source: Millennium Campaign website)

Five years on and today, international lobby groups such as Jubilee Research continue to monitor the situation to ensure that the promises made by the wealthier countries to cancel debt are being honoured as the debts are gradually written off. For updates and news on the Australian front, visit Jubilee Australia’s website.

With Jubilee 2000 behind us, there is a new campaign called the Micah Challenge. The Micah Challenge is essentially a global Christian campaign to encourage all 191 member states of the United Nations, including Australia, to fulfill the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) which they have pledged to achieve by 2015. Member states signed this Millennium Declaration at the 2000 UN Millennium Summit and briefly, the MDG are

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development.

To read more about the MDG, click here.

The Micah Call is a petition which urges world political leaders to meet their MDG promises. 24 million signatures were collected in the Jubilee Campaign and its impact was phenomenal. Imagine the impact we can make if the same pressure and encouragement is again applied to the world’s political leaders to fulfill their MDG promises. To sign the Micah Call petition, visit www.micahchallenge.org

If you feel you’d like to do more other than just adding your name to the petition, perhaps you might want to consider helping in a more practical way. The UN has declared 2005 to be the International Year of Microcredit and the UN's Economic and Social Council has endorsed microcredit programs as being effective and successful in “lifting people out of poverty in many countries” and that these programs have “especially benefited women and have resulted in the achievement of their empowerment” and that microcredit programs “in addition to their role in the eradication of poverty, have also been a factor contributing to the social and human development process.”


International Year of Microcredit

Now, what is microcredit, you ask? Essentially, microcredit involves various organizations and agencies lending small loans to people (often women) living in poverty who have no means of obtaining financial capital from the commercial banks in order to help them break out of the poverty cycle.

One organisation that provides such microcredit loans is Opportunity International, an Australian organisation accredited by AusAID that provides loans to carefully selected individuals in Third World countries at reasonable interest rates to assist them in breaking out of poverty/debt trap caused by crippling commercial bank interest rates etc. In essence, Opportunity International helps the poor help themselves. Foreign aid can help the poor for a period of time but Opportunity International helps the individual to provide for themselves for the long term.

Basically what Opportunity International does is they provide a small loan to create a business plus training in basic business practices and as the business grows, income is generated and families are then able to meet basic needs like food, education, medical care and housing. Opportunity International serves the poor in 27 countries around the world and in 2003, the organisation gave loans to 500,000 people, creating or sustaining 922,000 jobs. Since 2000, Opportunity International has disbursed more than 2.5 million loans, impacting over 20 million people.

Apart from disbursing loans to the poor, in 1993, OI also established Trust Banks, a kind of group-based lending product which allows about 10-25 poor entrepreneurs to come together to receive business loans, training and mentoring and members also guarantee each other’s loans in lieu of collateral. This loan money is recycled once it has been paid back and it has a repayment rate of between 95% to 97%. A full Trust Bank costs $10,000 to set up and visionary investors who invest are kept informed of their Trust Bank portfolio, a list of members benefiting from the loans and their businesses.

To make a one-off tax-deductible donation to Opportunity International or to find out more about investing in a Trust Bank either as a club, a group, a family, a couple or even as an individual or with some friends, visit Opportunity International’s Australian website at www.opportunity.org.au.