Ottawa - The United Nations is this week launching a campaign to bring basic financial services to more than one billion people around the world who lack the means to start businesses, make investments or even begin saving money.

The UN will declare 2005 as the International Year of Micro-credit, urging countries to help grow the networks of small-scale financial institutions - often community-based and locally owned - that serve people with little income or collateral.

As part of the effort, Canada must make more aid to so-called micro-credit institutions part of its wider foreign aid, said the president and chief executive of a non-profit organization with about 35 years' experience in the sector.

``They have to include the development of financial services, (the structuring) of financial services in their poverty reduction strategy,'' Anne Gaboury of Developpement international Desjardins said Monday.

DID, a subsidiary of the Desjardins Group, this country's sixth largest financial institution, is one of a handful of non-governmental organization involved in micro-financing.

It provides technical help for community-based financing in about 20 countries in Africa, Central and South America and Asia.

``The only thing that is micro in micro-finance is the amount of the credit, the amount of the savings, but certainly not the amount of transactions,'' Gaboury said.

The ongoing annual allotment to micro-financing operations worldwide by the Canadian International Development Agency is about $40 million, said a CIDA official.

Ottawa's latest micro-finance project is expected to be underway soon in Afghanistan.

According to the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development, ``90 per cent of the world's self-employed poor,'' lack access to basic banking services.

Such conditions prevent this group from growing their finances or from receiving loans for new businesses.

The UN also suggests women are at particular disadvantage if they cannot make use of accessible financial services.

Women make up about 70 per cent of the 1.2 billion people living on less than $1 US a day, the UN said a in a news release. Women have higher unemployment rates in almost every country and have the majority of lower-paid and non-unionized jobs.

Canada will host an international conference on micro-financing in 2006, said a spokesman for International Development Minister Aileen Carroll.