Mr. Speaker, next week in Halifax, 2,000 delegates, including Nobel peace prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, will assemble for the Global Microcredit Summit.
This will be a crucial moment in a campaign using micro loans to lift half a billion people out of extreme poverty by 2015, fulfilling the UN millennium development goal of cutting in half the number of people living on less than $1 a day.
At the world AIDS conference, grandmothers identified microcredit as a literal lifeline to survival for women raising 13 million AIDS orphans. I look forward to chairing the summit's session on how microcredit contributes to gender equality.
I urge the foreign affairs minister to seize tomorrow's news conference with the director of the microcredit summit campaign as the ideal opportunity for Canada to reverse its shameful 50% decrease over the past five years in CIDA funding for microcredit.
With microcredit reaching more than 110 million people worldwide, 82 million of them the poorest of the poor, it is time for Canada to invest more than a mere 1% of its official ODA on this proven poverty reduction tool.