E/CN.4/1999/48 page 18 harsh penalties. For both moral and economic reasons, reducing dependency on usury and widening access to credit at viable commercial rates is a high priority. 73. Several micro-credit experiences have been developed by the United Nations Secretariat, the specialized agencies and United Nations Funds and Programmes. Among them, “Sustainable Banking for the Poor” (SBP) is a joint programme by the World Bank, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Norway, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the Ford Foundation aiming at building sustainable financing institutions that are effective in reaching the poor. Case studies in Asia, Africa and Latin America cover a wide range of types of institutions and programmes, including commercial banks, specialized banks, credit unions, non-governmental organizations and non-bank financial institutions. 74. In August 1997, UNDP created the Special Unit for Microfinance (SUM) to bring together, and build synergy between, the growing microfinance work of UNDP and established credit and microfinance activities. Since many microfinance institutions fail because they lack key support at the initial stage of their development, UNDP has contracted organizations such as the Grameen Bank and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) to help them through extensive training and support. 75. UNDP has also set up a Small Grants Programme (SGP) within the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which has a number of projects reducing poverty in environmentally supportive ways. The programme aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of a decentralized funding mechanism based upon community participation and local decision-making in project design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. 76. The “Assisting Communities Together” (ACT) Project is a new initiative of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights designed to empower people at the local level to undertake activities to promote and protect human rights by providing small grants up to US$ 2,000. The project is highlighting the importance of local human rights initiatives which, though small in scale, can make a vital contribution to the improvement of the human rights record at the national and local levels. The pilot phase of the ACT Project has been launched in 26 countries. 77. Some 10 million women worldwide now have access to the microcredit system. Participants in the Microcredit Summit, held in Washington, D.C. in February 1997, undertook to see that the figure would be 100 million in 2005. 78. However, microfinance is not a magic formula for reducing poverty. Poor people have long been used to taking out small consumer loans, but it is harder for microcredit systems to help the poor to set up income-generating activities of any size (see A/53/223, paras. 13-15). Without successful income-generating activities that enable loans to be repaid, microfinance institutions find it difficult to survive; many of them were heavily subsidized in the past. 79. As the Secretary-General observed in his report on the role of microcredit in the eradication of poverty, credit needs to be supplemented