SENSE OF THE CONGRESS ON CONSIDERATION OF MEXICO AS A KEY PRIORITY IN MICROENTERPRISE FUNDING ALLOCATIONS.

SEC. 110. SENSE OF THE CONGRESS ON CONSIDERATION OF MEXICO AS A KEY PRIORITY IN MICROENTERPRISE FUNDING ALLOCATIONS. (a) Findings.—Congress makes the following findings: (1) An estimated 45,000,000 of Mexico’s 100,000,000 population currently lives below the poverty line, accounting for 20 percent of all poor in Latin America. (2) Mexico cannot create enough salaried jobs to absorb new workers entering the labor force. (3) While many poor families depend on microenterprise initiatives to generate a livelihood, the United States Agency for International Development currently has two microcredit projects in Mexico, receiving less than 1 percent of overall microenterprise funding in Latin America and the Caribbean during the last decade. (4) Mexico’s microenterprise activity has been constrained because its financial institutions cannot expand financial services to a larger clientele due to a lack of capital, inefficient financial and administrative management, and a lack of institutional support for microfinance institutions’ particular needs. (5) Mexican nongovernmental organizations, such as Compartamos, have demonstrated competence in developing local microfinance programs. (6) On July 2, 2000, Vicente Fox Quesada of the Alliance for Change was elected President of the United Mexican States. (7) The President-elect of Mexico has identified entrepreneurship and the start-up of new microcredit institutions as key economic priorities. (8) Microenterprise and entrepreneurial initiatives have proven to be successful components of free market development and economic stability. (b) Sense of the Congress.—It is the sense of the Congress that— (1) providing Mexico’s poor with economic opportunity and microfinance services is fundamental to Mexico’s economic development; (2) microenterprise can have a positive impact on Mexico’s free market development; and 114 STAT. 1090 (3) the United States Agency for International Development should consider Mexico as a key priority in its microenterprise funding allocations.