In many countries, women, who are a significant proportion of the Poor and suffer disproportionately from poverty, operate many of these micro enterprises. Most formal financial institutions do not serve the poor because of Perceived high risks, high costs involved in small transactions, Perceived low relative profitability, and inability of the poor to provide the physical collateral usually required by such institutions. The business culture of these institutions is also not geared to serve poor and low-income households. Lacking access to institutional sources of finance, most poor and low-income households continue to rely on meager self-finance or informal sources of microfinance. However, these sources limit their ability to actively participate in and benefit from the development process . Thus, a segment of the poor population that has viable investment opportunities persists in poverty for lack of access to credit at reasonable costs. The poor also lack access to institutional credit for consumption smoothening and to other services such as payments, money transfers, and insurance. Most of the poor households also find it difficult to accumulate financial savings without easy access to safe institutions that provide deposit services.

GLOPEC will develop a set of indicators before the end of 2008 to monitor Implementation of this strategy. The indicators will focus mainly on improvements in the

• Environment for microfinance at the country level,
• Extent of commercialization of the industry, and
• Development impact of assistance.
• GLOPEC will report the progress of its microfinance operations to its Board of Directors annually through its report on poverty reduction efforts.

Small Scale Businesses | Traders | Agricultural Farmers | Entrepreneurs