Banker to the Poor

I am currently juggling four books: Endgame (a biography of the chess prodigy Bobby Fisher) a chess strategy book to accompany Endgame, Plato's Republic, and a book entitled Banker to the Poor. Given the fact that Banker to the Poor is subtitled "Micro-lending and the battle against world poverty," it is the book most relevant to my project (though, should anybody wish to discuss the merits of a Sicilian Defense or a Ruy Lopez opening, feel free to comment as well).

Banker to the Poor, first published in 1999, describes Dr. Muhammad Yunus' development of the Grameen Bank. Dr. Yunus, a Bengali professor of economics, created the Grameen Bank to provide micro-loans to the poor in Bangladesh. These micro-loans are lent out with extremely low interest rates, and those who take out the loans are allowed a long period of repayment. As Yunus mentions many times throughout his book, the percentage of repayment is startlingly high, averaging between 95 and 98 percent. Initially, it took merely cents (or taka as the currency is in Bangladesh) for, say, a bamboo stool maker to bypass a typical moneylender or middle-man to buy her own bamboo and break the cycle of poverty. By purchasing bamboo using a loan, she could make the stool and sell it at market price rather than selling the stool to the middle-man for much less than the stool was actually worth. Her profits then, could be used to pay back the loan. As her business grows, the loans she may take out also grow in size. Grameen also provides housing loans.

As is the case for many successful endeavors (BASIS for instance!), Grameen grew and garnered much international attention. Yunus combated the Bangladeshi banking system of the 1980s to expand Grameen throughout his native Bangladesh. It wasn't long before Grameen projects were started in other countries, such as Malaysia and the Philippines. In addition to raising hell amongst bankers in Bangladesh, Yunus also received criticisms from leaders of such esteemed organizations as the World Bank. Despite resistance by established banking systems and financial institutions, Grameen has continued to grow (Muhammad Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006), and hundreds of micro-credit programs based of the Grameen system exist in over a hundred countries.

I hope this introduction to the work of Dr. Muhammad Yunus gives you all a sufficient background to my topic of micro-venturing. The methods of the Social Entrepreneur Corps are different from those of Yunus and the Grameen Bank, but it is important to look at the Grameen Bank as it is the first to do "micro-anything" (micro-lending, micro-credit, micro-venturing...).

I leave two weeks from Sunday! Oh and Happy Birthday to me

-Goyo Asado