Nearly 200 million poor people worldwide, 70% of them women, have gained access to financial services through microfinance. This was stated at the University of Navarra by María Jesús Pérez, deputy director general of the NGO CODESPA. NGO CODESPAdirector who visited the Navarra Center for International Development at Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) together with the organization's general director, José Ignacio González-Aller.

At campus Pamplona, they presented one of the latest cooperation projects developed by CODESPA in the Dominican Republic at partnership with Banco ADOPEM, the country's leading microfinance institution. This bank provides microcredits to small producers in the agricultural sector so that they can improve production levels, reduce costs and improve product quality. More than 1.2 million people in this Latin American country work in this sector, which accounts for 16% of the region's Gross Domestic Product.

16,000 small farmers benefited

According to María Jesús Pérez, project has been a great success in the country and has reached some 16,000 small producers. It has a rural loan portfolio of US$9.4 million and an agricultural loan portfolio of US$4 million. "We also hope to develop other financial products to cover the needs of other links in the chain that are not only producers," he said.

José Ignacio González-Aller stressed that there is a very important issue in these programs: "We have to see what the incentive is for those who demand and those who offer the product".

González-Aller recalled that there are more than 3,600 microfinance institutions. "The fact that such a large industry has been consolidated generates many challenges and opportunities, such as bringing microfinance to the most rural areas."

CODESPA is an international NGO based in Spain. It has 29 years of experience in the economic development as a strategy to fight poverty. In that time it has managed around 1,000 projects in 33 countries in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.