NEW YORK, Oct 14: Sehba Musharraf will head a delegation to the Microcredit plus 5 summit here from Nov 10 to 13, which will be attended by some 3,000 delegates from 140 countries.

President of Mexico, Vincente Fox, will host the conference, which will be attended, among others, by United States Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil, Senator Hillary Clinton and first lady of Niger, Laraba Tandja.

The goal of the summit, the organizers say, is to challenge the world leaders to adopt microcredit as a key tool to fight poverty in the developing world, particularly among the women.

The World Bank estimates that 1.2 billion people live in poverty.

Microcredit institutions provide credit for self-employment and other financial services, such as savings, to help the very poor start or expand tiny businesses and work their way out of poverty.

The 1997 Microcredit Summit launched a nine-year campaign to reach 100 million of the world’s poorest families, especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by 2005.

A press release says that when thousands of delegates gather for a five-year review of the 1997 summit, organizers plan to show that most United Nations and other donor agencies have missed the mark by omitting microcredit from their list of key tools for cutting absolute poverty in half by 2015, one of the Millennium Development Goals.