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.

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.