PRESS BRIEFING BY WORLD BANK

There was a new sense of urgency since 11 September among the world's people to address poverty, the President of Environics International Ltd. said during a briefing for correspondents today on the public opinion views on sustainable development in the run-up to the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development.  He added that research suggested that this was a historic moment and an opportunity for a Kennedy-like call to action on sustainable development.

Also attending the World Bank-sponsored briefing this morning were Ian Johnson, World Bank Vice-President of the Environmental Socially Sustainable Development Network and Sam Daley-Harris, the Microcredit Summit Campaign Director.

Doug Miller, President, Environics International Ltd., said that his role was to apply quantitative survey research to different global audiences.  A survey of 23,000 people in 23 countries had recently been completed, he said.  The results showed that a decade after the Rio Summit, the overwhelming majority of people across the globe felt the environment in their respective countries had worsened.  When asked what must be a top priority when world leaders meet in September 2002, people had responded that poverty was a priority.  This clearly showed that people had understood the importance of primary prevention. 

Experts across 30 countries had reported that they did not believe that progress towards sustainable development was moving quickly enough to avert major irreversible damage to human, social and eco-system health.  Poverty, in their minds, was second only to fresh water as a pressing issue.  He stressed that expectations were very high for any gathering of world leaders, such as the World Summit on Sustainable Development.  Both citizens and experts seemed to believe that there had been a backslide since Rio.  The leadership agenda was obliged to go beyond presenting progress reports in a positive light, or public opinion momentum would not be captured.

Ian Johnson of the World Bank said that public opinion shaped agendas.  This would be profoundly important in the next day or two, when seeing what might happen in the streets of New York during the World Economic Forum.  The World Bank was essentially a shareholder organization, with government shares, but increasingly it had started to listen to its stakeholders.  It was essential for the World Bank to take stock of current trends and listen to public opinion, non-governmental organizations, the private sector, governments and academics on these issues. 

The World Bank mission was directly related to poverty reduction, he said.  Poverty was a central driver of disruption and social malaise.  It was not only a moral imperative to reduce poverty, but it was increasingly a survivability agenda.  For the survival of the planet, poverty needed to be addressed, both its direct and underlying causes.  The Summit in Johannesburg would be a historic opportunity for leaders to put poverty at the top of the agenda.    

Sam Daley-Harris, the Microcredit Campaign Director, said that the Microcredit Summit's goal was to ensure that 100 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women of these families, were receiving credit for self-employment and other financial services by 2005.  It had been found that Micro-credit programmes had attacked poverty at its source by increasing household consumption expenditures of its participants.  As many as 5 per cent of participant households were able to lift their families out of poverty every year through micro-credit programmes. 

He referred to the Kennedy-like goal of cutting absolute poverty, the Millennium Goals and the benchmarks along the way.  He said that that the microcredit goal for 2005 was among those benchmarks.  At the end of 1997,      618 programmes were reaching 7.6 million families, and at the end of 2000,     1500 programmes were reaching 19.3 million families.  Microcredit would contribute to the reduction of poverty, by focusing on the core themes of reaching the poorest, reaching and empowering women, building financially self-sufficient institutions and ensuring impact.   

When asked by a correspondent how microcredit operated and where families could turn, Mr. Daley-Harris said that in simple terms it worked through non-governmental organizations, micro-banks and credit and savings cooperatives.  Sometimes there were individual loans or groups would get together and get a joint loan.  It could work in several different ways.      

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