WASHINGTON. Feb 1: Bangladesh comes into the spotlight on global plane when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina opens the first-ever World Microcredit Summit beginning here tomorrow report agencies.

The three-day summit is seen as a global campaign with a boost from US President Bill Clinton, to raise billions of dollars to provide credit to the poor.

A fund of 21.6 billion US dollars is expected to be announced from the summit to provide small loan to world's 100 million poorest people by the year 2005.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. one of the co-chairpersons of the summit, will arrive here this (Saturday) evening from Miami.

US First Lady Rodham Hillary Clinton, who has taken a personal initiative for the meet, is also one of the four co-chairpersons to the summit. Two others are Queen Sophia of Spain and Former Japanese prime minister Tsutomo Hata.

The organisers said the

summit would discuss the Grameen Bank model to eradicate poverty from the world by providing loan to 10 crore poor families of the world through micro-lending system, a success story of Bangladesh.

The summit is expected to attract more than 2,000 people from 100 countries who believe making small loans, often no more than a few hundred dollars. is a good way to help the poor improve their living standards.

Micro-credit programmes provide small loans to the very poor to help them start of expand small self-employment enterprises. The loans are usually for less than 1,000 dollars and sometimes for as little as 4 dollars. According to the World Bank, microenterprises are typically informal sector businesses with five workers or fewer and with fixed assets valued at less than 10.000 dollars.

The summit "Declaration and Plan of Action" that participants will be asked to approve, notes that despite impressive results in countries like

Bangladesh and Bolivia — and extremely low default rates worldwide — existing programmes reach only about eight million of an estimated 100 million families who could benefit from access to even tiny amounts of credit.

The goal outlined in the summit declaration and plan of action is to make microenterprise lending available to the remaining 92 million needy families — 88 million from developing countries and four million from industrialised nations. It defines the "poorest" families in the developing world as the bottom 50 per cent of those living below the poverty line. In industrialised countries, the plan of action focuses on all persons living below the poverty line.

The plan also pledges to target the world's poorest women, many of whom earn far less than their male counterparts and own no capital or land. Experts stressed that providing credit to mothers is one of the most effective ways to alleviate

poverty.

Besides, a number of heads of state or government, chiefs of different international financial institutions and other donor agencies are expected to attend the meet.

Bangladeshi community in the US capital has organised a reception this evening in honour of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.