London (AP)--An international development agency said Tuesday it would use the U.N.'s Year of Microcredit to work with banks to deliver financial services to the world's poorest people.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development said more than a billion people lacked access to basic financial services, depriving them of the means to improve their incomes and cope with emergencies.

The U.N.-designated 2005 International Year of Microcredit will be launched Thursday in the stock exchanges, including New York and Milan.

IFAD chief development strategist Gary Howe said the yearlong focus would be an opportunity to extend microcredit - the provision of credit in small amounts to poor people - and deliver a broader range of financial services to the poor.
He said the development agency would work with banks to explore ways of overcoming the costs of providing banking services to poor people, many of whom live in rural areas.

''We have to work with commercial banks and big government banks and try to find ways of reaching, and ways of working with, poor people,'' Howe said.

He said many self-employed poor worked as farmers and tradespeople and required banking and credit facilities to run a viable business.

Providing access to basic finance tools such as credit, savings, insurance and money transfers could permanently lift millions out of poverty and help meet the goal of halving the number of people living on less than $1 a day by 2015.

Howe said one of the pioneers of microcredit programs - the Grameen Bank, established in 1978 - now served 2.4 million borrowers in Bangladesh.

Another successful microcredit agency was the Philippines' Center for Agricultural and Rural Development which established rural banking services for landless and asset-less rural poor in 1997.

Founder and chairman Aris Alip said in 2001 the return on assets was about 3.3% and many of the agency's clients were no longer poor.