6.9 billion people live in our world today. Yet the economic playing field is far from level. The scourge of chronic poverty circles the globe with profound consequences:

• Ours is a world where 25,000 will not wake up tomorrow – due to the lack of calories to stay alive today.
• Ours is a world where more than half of us survive on less than $2 a day.
• Ours is a world where millions of children will never enter a classroom and only one in a hundred will have the opportunity to go to college. Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.
• Ours is a world where the excesses of our way of life in the West create profound limitations for our brothers and sisters in the rest of the world. The poorest 10% on the planet account for just 0.5% of consumption, while the wealthiest 10% account for 59%.

Still, ours is a world that God loves and longs to see restored to wholeness and right relationships. Hope endures – and we see it in the lives of our clients.

Experts around the world are convinced that sustainable economic development efforts must contain one essential element: job creation. While the solution to global poverty is multi-faceted, and microfinance is no panacea, long-term stabilization and economic growth must include new employment opportunities. Microfinance is one of the best ways, if not the best way, to stimulate job creation from the bottom-up.

Throughout the developing world, there are millions of people with the dreams, abilities and work ethic to start small businesses and find their way out of poverty. They simply need a favourable business culture – access to capital through small loans, a secure place to put their earnings such as savings accounts and insurance to mitigate against unexpected calamity – to get their enterprises up and running.

While not everyone in the developing world is an entrepreneur, studies estimate that roughly 600 million individuals could benefit from the business-building services that microfinance provides. Currently only 10% of the developing world has access to microfinance.