Sam Daley-Harris's remarks at the opening of the Summit

Opening Ceremony Remarks by
Sam Daley-Harris

Excellencies, distinguished delegates and honored guests. As you heard, my name is Sam Daley-Harris and I am Director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, a project of RESULTS Educational Fund. It is indeed a great honor to be in Bali Indonesia with this room full of visionaries at the Asia-Pacific Region Microcredit Summit.

As Director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, I welcome you and offer our sincere thanks to our hosts, Bank Indonesia and Gema PKM and to a top funder Bank Rakyat Indonesia. We are grateful for all you have done to make this Summit a success. I want to begin with two quotes that help express my gratitude for your inspiring work and leadership. The first comes from Jeffrey Sachs in his book, The End of Poverty. Here is what he said:

[Quote] At the most basic level, the key to ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development. The ladder of development hovers overhead, and the poorest of the poor are stuck beneath it. They lack the minimum amount of capital necessary to get a foothold, and therefore need a boost up to the first rung. [End of quote]

That is what the practitioners in this room are doing—providing the amount of capital necessary to help the very poor get a foothold, providing that boost to the first rung of the ladder and then the second rung and then the third. I am honored to be in your presence.
The second quote is from the rock singer and anti-poverty activist Bono of U2. Here is what he said:

[Quote] You know that mantra, "Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime?" It's missing something: microfinance is the fishing rod, the boat, the net, etc. Cash and dignity, side by side…. Maybe the mantra should be: "Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Give a woman microcredit, she, her husband, her children and her extended family will eat for a lifetime." [End of quote]

Again, that’s what the leaders in this room and your colleagues throughout Asia and around the world are doing. You are providing the fishing rod, the boat, the net and the dignity. I congratulate you and offer my gratitude.

This is very good new, but not all of the news is good. This industry stands at a fork in the road. Some in the field are already going down one path and some going down the other.

One path asks as its primary question about the well being of investors and about the well being of the microfinance institutions. Along this path, all too often, the well being of the clients is assumed or not even considered.

The other path asks, as its primary question, about the well being of the clients. Of course it is also concerned with the well being of the microfinance institutions. As John Hatch, the founder of FINCA has said, nobody ever ended poverty by going bankrupt.

We have a decision to make. Will we see microfinance primarily as a new asset class for the investors or will we break the rules of microfinance (just as microfinance broke the rules of banking) and continue to find ways to use this powerful tool to end poverty forever?

We are not here just for a big conference. We are not here for a few days of plenaries and workshops. We are here to forward the two Microcredit Summit Goals for 2015. We are here to forward two goals that give microfinance its dignity, that give microfinance its majesty and soul.

The first Microcredit Summit goal for 2015 is to reach 175 million of the world’s poorest families, especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services affecting 875 million family members.
The second goal, and for me the more exciting and more challenging goal is to ensure that 100 million families rise above the US$1 a day threshold lifting half a billion people out of extreme poverty.

This is our mission and this is our challenge.

Before I introduce our video, let me make these announcements. Directly after the Opening Ceremony there will be a break, but we ask that you remain in your seats until our plenary speakers have left the room. After the break, we will change the program order and start with the plenary titled: “Building Financial Systems that Work for the Majority: Local Currency Borrowing, On-Lending Savings, Autonomous Credit Funds, and Appropriate Legal Framework. Then, at the end of the day, we will present the plenary titled, “Expanding Commercialization Responsibly: Reflecting on the Compartamos IPO.”

In a moment we will see a brief video. The video is from the documentary Small Fortunes and it tells the story of Jorimon Khan. Jorimon Khan was married in 1962 at the age of 10 and had her first child at 15. By 1979 Jorimon, her husband, and her two children were living on the less than 20 cents a day which her husband earned as a day laborer—less than five cents a day per family member. Jorimon met Grameen Bank in 1979 and took a $10 loan in 1980. In 1981 she took a $33 loan. The camera crew meets Jorimon 25 years later.

This clip reminds us of why we are here and why achieving our goals is so important. Please show the video.