A little while ago, I read the powerful account Banker to the Poor by the founder of the micro-lending system, Professor Muhammad Yunus.
His idea is pretty ingenious – the idea that you can loan one person a couple dollars (or less) and change their life forever. It makes sense though. After all, 40% of the world lives on $2 a day or less. A good many of them have the determination, skills and smarts to succeed but what they are never given is the opportunity to do so. They’re stuck in a cycle of making just enough money to survive, unable to save and invest for next year, or even next week.
Straight out of Yunus’s account is the story of how he stumbled across the potential this miniature loan in the Bangaladesh countryside and began a journey that at the time, no one believed would succeed:
Sufiya Begum earned two cents a day [in profit after borrowing money from loan sharks to purchase raw materials and produce ]. It was this knowledge that shocked me. In my university courses, I theorized about sums in the millions of dollars, but here before my eyes the problems of life and death were posed in terms of pennies. Something was wrong. Why did my university courses not reflect the reality of Sufiya’s life? … Her children were condemned to live a life of penury, of hand-to-mouth survival, just as she had lived it before them, and as her parents did before her. I had never heard of anyone suffering for the lack of twenty-two cents…
Yunus goes on to talk about how he loans the twenty-two cents himself to Sufiya and forty others, sees the dramatic change that takes place, and eventually establishes the Grameen Bank (literally, “of the village”) to provide micro-loans all over the world. A very powerful story about one man who sees something wrong with the world around him, and has the imagination and perseverance to do something about it.
