Poverty breeds extremism: PM

HALIFAX, (Canada)—Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz Sunday urged the world community to fulfill its obligations and work together with utmost sincerity and commitment to find ways and means through creating employment and income generating opportunities for the poor segments of society to eradicate poverty.
Giving key-note address at the Global Micro-Credit Summit in the Canadian city of Halifax, the Prime Minister said poverty is the gravest challenge facing humanity at present and poverty and social deprivation lie at the root of extremism.
He proposed a five-point holistic and inclusive strategy for promotion and spreading of micro-credit in countries with high poverty levels. Shaukat Aziz called for fighting poverty from a common platform by pooling energy and resources of the international community to rid the world of poverty, hunger, disease and deprivation.
He said governments in developing countries must demonstrate a strong political commitment towards supporting microfinance coupled with imparting technical and vocational skills to the poor for sustainable income generation, involvement of multiple actors and institutions to ensure microfinance outreach to the target groups, secure commitments at the global level to ensure macro economic and regulatory frameworks to support the growth of microfinance and mainstreaming of the microfinance into the financial sector as a commercially-viable proposition.
The Prime Minister said extremism breeds in a festering sense of injustice and denial of economic opportunity and multiple interventions are required to cause a dent into poverty.
He said there is need for a lasting and sustainable poverty reduction strategy and it must focus on creating income-generating avenues for the poor and disenfranchised, particularly women.
He said Pakistan has successfully implemented a stabilization programme and wide ranging structural reforms which have put the economy back on the track of sustainable growth and poverty alleviation.
“Pakistan’s poverty reduction strategy has brought down the number of people below the poverty line from 34.5 percent in 2001 to 23.9 percent in 2005”, he said.
He referred to Fiscal Responsibility Law and added that is has been promulgated to ensure fiscal discipline and to obviate future policy slippages.
The Prime Minister said Pakistan has implemented a Poverty Reduction Strategy, built on four pillars of accelerating growth, investment in human development, promoting self-employment through microfinance and social safety nets for the most vulnerable groups.
Shaukat Aziz said Pakistan government has also established strong foundations of micro-finance in the formal sector along with extending support to civil  society institutions. Khushhali Bank was set up as the first specialized microfinance institution and a law was promulgated to provide separate regulatory framework for micro-credit institutions, he said.
The Prime Minister said four specialized microfinance banks have been established at district level in Pakistan. He also referred to a variety of institutional models to increase micro-credit coverage to the poor including the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, rural support programmes and credit lines for microfinance by commercial banks and leasing companies. He said Pakistan is combining micro-credit with skill development and social mobilization as a comprehensive strategy to enable the poor to make the best use of borrowed resources.
Appreciating the efforts of Nobel Laureate Prof. Yunus in the field of micro-credit, the Prime Minister said he established a successful example in this regard by establishing successful model of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh.
The Prime Minister also appreciated the contribution made by the Micro-credit Summit Campaign since 1997. He also welcomed the objective of the Summit to officially launch the campaign’s extension to 2015 by which time it is hoped to ensure that 175 million of the world’s poorest families, especially women, receive credit for self-employment as well as 100 million of the world’s poorest families move from below 1 dollar a day to above 1 dollar a day, adjusted for purchasing power parity.
He said serious challenges in terms of widening inequality between rich and poor nations are creating islands of opulence amidst oceans of poverty. The Prime Minister said war, illiteracy, poverty, pandemics, social injustice and intolerance still haunt the world while the poverty is the gravest challenge facing humanity at present. He said the poor suffer from lack of income and assets; they have little or no access to basic human needs such as health and education; they are handicapped because of social exclusion and voicelessness.
Shaukat Aziz said there is need to improve the coverage and outreach of micro-credit to the majority of poor populations.
Referring to measures taken by Pakistan government to eradicate poverty, the he said the government has implemented an ambitious and all-encompassing reform agenda, covering all aspects of national life; political, administrative, social and economic which has brought about a positive change in the country and the process of national renewal is well under way.—APP