Since April 2019, Jason Lamb of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has chaired CGAP's Executive Committee.
[3][4] CGAP was established in 1995, under a slightly different name Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest, in promoting and managing the microcredit sector.
[7] At the invitation of the G20, CGAP played a key role in drafting the policy paper for the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI) in 2010.
[8] The new terminology in the goal was also intended to reflect a change in the focus of the programme, which was linked to microcredit over-indebtedness crises in India, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Morocco, Nicaragua and Pakistan, among others.
These erupted from around 2008 because commercial microfinance providers had been very aggressive in pushing high-cost loans onto the market without adequately assessing the ability of their poor clients to repay them.
[9] There are also close links and collaboration with the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), which is funded by the Gates Foundation, a member of CGAP.