Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

In the 1970s Professor Mohammed Yunus had a great idea on how to help the poor of Bangladesh and he made it work. He invented micro-credit, or lending very small amounts to the poorest of the poor, without asking for collateral. This, rather than simple handouts, would help the poor become self-reliant enough so that they could lift themselves out of poverty. He concentrated on women. He relied on peer support to motivate repayment of the loans by making loans to one member of a group of women who would have access to credit only if the entire group had a good credit record (when a group started, they were assumed to have good credit). Professor Yunus's organization, the Grameen Bank, is a cooperative owned mostly by its members and boasts a repayment rate over 98%. In the 30 years since Professor Yunus's first loan of 27 dollars, Grameen has now lent out billions to millions. It has liberated women in small villages, it has brought capitalist market mechanisms to the economic bottom 2% of the world population. This first hand account by the American-educated Bangledeshi founder of Grameen Bank might not win any literary prize and it might end with a (I think) slightly naive vision of social work, but it effectively presents a simple story about a practical man who has made millions of the world's poorest people significantly better off.

Founded in Bangladesh by Muhammad Yunus in 1976, the Grameen Bank is one of the most successful attempts ever to employ capitalist principles to achieve social goals. By approaching poverty from a different tact, Grameen seeks to reconcile the inequalities inherent in capitalism by mobilizing the "informal sector" of society-the self-employed poor. By addressing the root cause of poverty (i.e. lack of access to capital) Yunus has succeeded where many others have failed. Often, well-intentioned governments fail to solve the issue of poverty because of "misguided development" policies and bloated bureaucracies. Similarly, many international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, have failed because their heavy-handed top-down approach excludes those most in need of aid. Yunus writes, "I have always believed that the elimination of poverty from the world is a matter of will" (248). Grameen succeeds where others fail because they appeal to the most downtrodden, the poorest of the poor-the bottom 50% of those already below the poverty line. A precocious child and avid reader-especially of comicbooks-Yunus was one of fourteen children born to devout Muslim parents. The family lived on the second floor located above the jewelry store that his father owned and operated in Chittagong, the largest port-city in Bangladesh. His mother, despite her later mental illness, instilled a sense of charity early on in her son that would last a lifetime. While the seeds of the Grameen Bank were planted when Yunus was a child, they were certainly nurtured while studying under the tutelage of professor Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in America. Yunus left to attend Vanderbilt University as a Fulbright scholar in 1965 after opening a successful packaging business in Bangladesh. The professor encouraged Yunus to question traditional economic theory, and to adopt a more pragmatic and social perspective. These influences resurfaced when Yunus returned to Bangladesh in 1972 to chair the economics department at Chittagong University. Yunus experienced an epiphany one day while lecturing to his students. Amidst his moribund surroundings, Yunus became compelled to confront the obvious incongruence between the high theory he was espousing and the omnipresent reality of daily-life, "What good were all my complex theories when people were dying of starvation on the sidewalks and porches across from my lecture hall? Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me" (viii). Yunus at once realized that he had an obligation as both a Bengali and a college professor to help alleviate the rampant starvation that wracked Bangladesh at the time. After much contemplation Yunus decided that the best way to improve the material condition of the poor was to offer them a hand-up, rather than a handout. Yunus concluded that the poor were quite capable of prospering if only they were given the credit necessary to break out of poverty. He writes: "But if you go ou

One of the more fascinating life histories I've read in a long time, Muhammad Yunus' autobiography enlightens more than entertains. And what enlightenment!Born in 1940 in British-ruled India, Yunus recounts India's and his native East Pakistan's independence through the eyes of the seven-year-old he was. Replete with juvenile impressions of contemporary political and religious prejudices with their accompanying tensions, Yunus' account of independence and partition of the Indian subcontinent opened my eyes to a much different view of that history than I had ever read in adult-centric volumes.The watershed event for Muhammad Yunus was Bangladesh's 1974 famine that killed thousands. As a faculty member of Chittagong University, he petitioned government to wake up and do something. Instead of waiting for a bureaucracy to emerge, though, he began to organize farming projects and sought other ways to alleviate suffering.By 1976, Yunus had stumbled onto micro-lending. Realizing that local stool makers were not much more than slave laborers due their complete and total dependence on wholesalers for both daily credit for raw materials and a monopolistic market over which they had no price control, Yunus broke the cycle by lending 42 stoolmakers the total equivalent of US$27 from his own pocket.From those unplanned and humble beginnings, the Grameen Bank was founded by an economics professor who had no intention of becoming a banker-much less a banker to the poor.Today, Grameen Bank ("grameen" is an adjective meaning "village" or "rural" in the Bangla language) serves over two million micro-borrowers in nearly 40,000 Bangladeshi villages. It leads the way as a model for similar micro-lending movements in dozens of other countries, including the United States.Professor Yunus' vision of eliminating poverty (defined as a situation where one cannot provide for his/her own basic needs) by 2050 is a challenge for our generation. Are we up to the task? I believe I know the answer. After reading Banker to the Poor, you can also know.

This is the story of one man who extracted himself from economic theory long enough to see poverty in human terms, to trust in human beings, to form them into self-help units, to express that "trust" in economic terms and watch the seeds of faith grow into an international garden of success. In this garden today, grow the solutions to the world's most pressing problems. Now it is up to the rest of us to harvest crop.

If you know the story of Grameen Bank, and wanted to know more about the founder - I don't need to say anymore.If you haven't heard of Grameen, prepare yourself to learn about a bank which has overturned the conventional wisdom about helping people who live in poverty.Yunus' big idea can be put very simply: people who live on less than $1 per day (3 billion people) don't need to be tought how to feed themselves and survive - the very fact that they are alive is testament to their abilities.His approach rests upon that faith in people's ability to help themselves, if given access to the very small amounts of loan capital they need to start a profitable venture - whether that is weaving cloth or repairing bicycles.The road to reaching more than 2 million people in Bangladesh, and many other millions worldwide, wasn't smooth. What you get from reading this book is a sense that sometimes the 'homegrown' solution beats the 'imposed' ideas from the developed world.A challenging book for liberals and conservatives alike!