AGFUND Presents to the Global Microcredit Summit Stories of Success from4 Banks for the Poor in the Arab Region

The Arab Gulf Program for Development (AGFUND) presents to the global forum, held in Valladolid, Spain from the period of 14 till 17 November 2011, the essence of its projects for fighting poverty as well as its experience in the field of establishing the banks for the poor in the Arab World and Africa, under the leadership of the President of AGFUND, His Royal Highness/ Prince Talal Bin Abdulaziz. AGFUND participates in the Global Microcredit Summit, hosted by Spain (14 – 17 November, 2011) within the series of global summits that deal with poverty issues and the mechanisms required for fighting and ending them. AGFUND will take part in Madrid Summit with a great stock of success in the field of “Banks for the Poor” and participations in the global endeavors to contain poverty and integrate the poor in the production process. In this Global Summit, AGFUND presents concrete facts and patterns of success achieved by the banks for the poor in the Arab region, and just as well, it also presents the eminent progress that the Arab Gulf Program for Development has achieved in the field of establishing the banks for the poor. The global and regional microcredit summit conferences held by the Microcredit Summit Campaign have been commenced in 1997, when a campaign of nine years was launched to reach by the year 2005, 100 million of the world’s poorest families, and it specifically targeted women in an attempt to finance their small projects and provide them with financial and commercial services as well as empowering them to step out of the poverty scope. AGFUND presents to the Valladolid Summit stories of success of the microcredit mechanism and the banks for the poor services, out of which million Arab citizens benefited , via the banks that it established in the Arab region with the participation of the governments and the private sector ( in each of Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria). The AGFUND experiment is not limited to these four banks, for there are also the banks for the poor that have by now entered the implementation phase in each of Sudan and Lebanon. AGFUND takes its experiment to West Africa where the preparations for founding yet one other bank for the poor in Sierra Leone. Regarding the fact that fighting poverty has always been a globally joint burden, AGFUND consistently demonstrates for the world the efforts that it exerts to contain this development-impeding phenomenon. Derived by this concept, was the participation of AGFUND in the Africa-Middle East Microcredit regional conference, one that was held in Amman, Jordan, October 2004. This conference was among the important events that enhanced the inspiring initiative of the president of AGFUND / Prince Talal Bin Abdulaziz, to establish the banks for the poor in the Arab region. AGFUND has similarly participated in the Global Microcredit Summit in Halifax, Canada (November 2006). Likewise, with the participation of AGFUND, the Asia-Pacific Microcredit Summit was held in Bali, Indonesia. Moreover, AGFUND has taken part in the Africa-Middle East Global Microcredit Summit, which was held in the period of 7 – 10 April, 2010 in Nairobi, Kenya. This summit discussed setting an African road map intended for snatching the whole continent out of the “Depths of Poverty”.