The Village Bank

Micro-lending makes dollars and sense

by TOM SANDBORN

Here’s a fascinating idea. Instead of attacking world poverty with top-heavy aid programs that do more for big business and corrupt government officials than they do for poor people, why not put money and its power for change directly into the hands of the poorest of the poor?

Muhammad Yunus, author of Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (with Alan Jolis, Perseus Books Group), has spent most of his adult life turning this concept into an organization that blends a passion for social justice with the sometimes cumbersome and destructive machinery of the free market.

Yunus is a world-renowned economist from Bangladesh, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize and creator of a unique approach to poverty alleviation known as micro-lending. Working through the Grameen (or “village”) Bank, Yunus and his colleagues have created a membership-owned and -controlled institution dedicated to putting small amounts of capital into the hands of its members, mainly women from the lowest economic levels in Bangladesh. The micro-loans are typically used to purchase livestock, materials for home handicraft production, foodstuffs for preparation and resale, or other supplies for small, home-based businesses.

In this relentlessly cheerful autobiography, first published in the late ’90s and re-issued last year to take advantage of the Nobel Prize buzz, Yunus argues that micro-lending represents a revolutionary new approach to eliminating poverty. Extending to the poorest people what those of us higher on the economic ladder take for granted—enough credit to launch an income-generating enterprise, on terms that do not bleed the borrower dry—can make a significant impact on the bone-crushing poverty that still entraps millions.

Yunus makes a compelling case. The Grameen Bank has lent nearly $4 billion to its member- clients since its inception in 1983, and 95 per cent of those borrowers are poor women. By 2003, the Grameen Bank had helped 2.4 million families in rural Bangladesh. The bank has been self-supporting since 1995, making a profit while giving millions of the country’s poorest women the tools to improve and, sometimes, literally to save their lives.

And the success of the Grameen model has not been limited to Bangladesh. In nearly 100 countries, more than 250 micro-lending bodies inspired by the Grameen Bank now bring their benefits to the poor.

Here’s how it works. Grameen staff form teams of five potential borrowers. Each team works collaboratively to develop ideas for money-making enterprises that could be launched with a small loan—such as the production of stools from bamboo or the weaving of scarves. Each team guarantees the loans and supports its members in developing the project, while tiny repayments are made on a weekly basis; the Grameen Bank boasts one of the best loan recovery rates in the fiscal world.

The Grameen approach, an odd blend of anarchist mutual aid and capitalist profit-taking, has puzzled and infuriated critics at both ends of the political spectrum. Radical Islamist imams in the Bangladeshi countryside have attacked Yunus as an enemy of the faith, and Marxist guerillas have condemned his bank as a source of counter-revolutionary reaction.

Some critics say the Grameen Bank, for all its immediate impacts on human suffering, has been oversold by its proponents and used as a rhetorical club to beat up on other approaches to poverty that can also play an important role, such as well-targeted aid and government-run infrastructure and social welfare programs. (Weldon Bello, a well-known development economist based in the Philippines, recently took issue with microcredit in The Nation.)

Yunus has many supporters in ruling circles in the West, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the UN sponsored a Year of Microcredit in 2005. He rejects these criticisms and claims the microcredit methodology can eliminate extreme poverty on a global basis.

Yunus has created a model for alleviating poverty that is impressive in its results and elegant in its design. Banker to the Poor is a book for everyone concerned with the scandal of poverty and hunger persisting in a world of globalized wealth. Yunus is clearly a remarkable man and his book is a challenge to everyone living in comfort while others starve. You may or may not agree with the author’s most sweeping claims for the virtues of his approach, but time spent on this extraordinary book is a useful investment.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver, his home since a foreign policy dispute with the American government brought him to Canada in 1967. He is a director of the BC Civil Liberties Association and a lifelong activist in social justice and environmental issues.