Monday, January 21, 2008 Amante: $27 that changed millions of lives By Isolde D. Amante
MUHAMMAD Yunus tells the story of how, over 30 years ago, he would visit villages in rural Bangladesh to persuade “hidden women” to get loans from the then-fledgling Grameen Bank. The women were literally hidden. Purdah—the traditional rules that are meant to preserve feminine modesty—kept them from being seen by any men who weren’t their husbands or close relatives.
To communicate, Yunus recalled, he would sit in a clearing, while the women would gather in one house, and one of his female students would allow them to exchange questions and answers by serving as the go-between. This went on for hours. One rainy day, the women told him to take shelter in an empty house next to the one where they had gathered, and they began conversing without the go-between’s help, shouting their questions from behind a bamboo wall.
As they listened, the women—about 25 in all—would press their ears against the bamboo partition. Pretty soon, part of the flimsy wall gave under pressure, and “before they knew what had happened, the women were sitting in the room listening and talking directly to me,” Yunus narrates in his memoir, “Banker to the Poor” (Public Affairs, 2003).
By the time Yunus and Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2006, 97 percent of the nearly seven million people who had availed themselves of micro-credit loans were women, scattered in small groups across 73,000 villages. “We focused on women because we found giving loans to women always brought more benefits to the family,” Yunus said.
As a matter of policy, Grameen does not require skills training before handing out its small loans. “The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability. They do not need us to teach them how to survive; they already know how to do this,” Yunus said. By November 2002, an estimated 26.8 million of the families helped by micro-credit (pegged at 54 million families total) were scraping a living from less than US$1 a day. As of 2006, Grameen’s repayment rate stood at 99 percent.
Long-time borrowers who run their own micro-businesses also have the option to acquire shares in Grameen companies or mutual funds, through Grameen Securities Management, because Yunus says they “did not want our members to become dependent on their children, the government, Grameen, or businesses they were no longer able to run. After years of hard work in their micro-businesses, we wanted them to live their final years in dignified retirement.”
To do all this, Yunus started by dipping into his pocket to give 42 stool-makers of Jobra village a loan. The total amount involved? US$27. Granted, Yunus was also armed with an advanced degree in economics from Vanderbilt University, but still: think of all the millions of families whose lives have become better, because he reached out to them, listened to them and gave them not just a loan, but even more valuable gifts to help them break down poverty’s walls: belief in their capacity to gain financial know-how and faith in their abilities.
(Let’s talk: isolde.amante@gmail. com or www.peryodistang-pinay. blogspot.com)
