International Development written question – answered at on 22 January 2008.
Annette Brooke
Shadow Minister (Education), Shadow Spokesperson (Children, Schools and Families)
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development what estimate he has made of the percentage of his Department's funding for microfinance which reaches families living on the equivalent of less than US$1 a day.
Gareth Thomas
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform) (Trade and Consumer Affairs) (also Department for International Development), Parliamentary Under-Secretary(Department for International Development) (Trade Policy) (also Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform), Party Chair, Co-operative Party
The Department for International Development is committed to tackling poverty and reducing the number of people living on less than US$1 a day. All of our programmes, including our financial sector programmes, are designed to help the world's poorest people.
A review of DFID's largest financial sector programmes showed that in 2006 more than nine million people benefited from microfinance initiatives that received support from DFID in that year. DFID programmes use different, country specific, measures of poverty for measuring their impact. Calculating an aggregate figure, across all programmes, for the proportion of families living on less than US$1 per day would incur a disproportionate cost. DFID regularly carries out evaluations of its programmes to ensure that they are reaching the poorest people.
Secretary of State was originally the title given to the two officials who conducted the Royal Correspondence under Elizabeth I. Now it is the title held by some of the more important Government Ministers, for example the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
