Banker to the
Poor: A Vision for a Poverty-free World
By Dr. Ahmed S. Khan
Addison, IL
"Give
a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a
man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime"
--- Chinese proverb
Professor Yunus does not believe in charity or elaborate
government spending programs to eliminate poverty;
rather he strongly puts his trust in empowering
individuals by providing them the privilege of micro
credit, that is, loaning them money at very low
interest rate. In his words “…charity,
like love, can be prison.”
Embracing the principle of “teaching a man
to fish,” Professor Yunus realized the importance
of offering micro credit to the poor and hence transformed
the lives of millions of people in Bangladesh and
around the world. He believes that the right to
credit should be recognized as a fundamental human
right because credit is the last hope left to those
faced with absolute poverty.
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2006 was awarded to Muhammad
Yunus and Grameen Bank for their efforts to create
economic and social development from below. The
Nobel Prize committee observed that “lasting
peace cannot be achieved unless large population
groups find ways in which to break out of poverty.
Micro credit is one such means. Development from
below also serves to advance democracy and human
rights.”
For the last three decades Professor Yunus has won
accolades from many world leaders for his work to
end poverty. Former US president Jimmy Carter has
said: “By giving poor people the power to
help themselves, Dr. Yunus has offered them something
far more valuable than a plate of food-security
in its most fundamental form.” Former US first
lady, Hilary Clinton said, “I only wish every
nation shared Dr. Yunus’s and the Grameen
Bank’s appreciation of the vital role that
girls and women play in the economic, social and
political life of our societies.”
Banker to the Poor is the autobiography of Muhammad
Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, the person and
the institution who have transformed the theories
of dealing with the complex societal problem of
poverty by offering the simple and innovative solution
of micro credit. Professor Yunus’s autobiographical
account, in fact, is an appeal for a universal action:
Nations should concentrate on promoting the will
to survive and the courage to build the very first
and the most essential element of economic cycle
-- Man.
Eloquently, forcefully, passionately, Dr. Yunus
shows the reader how, by extending micro credit
to the poor, poverty can be eliminated. The book
is a fascinating read, a time-travel through the
past six decades, telling the tale of a dream of
ending poverty form its emergence to its fulfillment.
His narrative is simple in style but full of insights.
He provides a self-portrait of his life’s
journey, from growing up at 20 Boxirhat Road, Chittagong
to going to the United States for graduate studies;
from coming back to Chittagong and finding the anomalies
between the elegant theories of economics and the
dismal state of poverty in Jobra village to the
creation of the experiment of offering micro credit
to the poor; from establishment of Grameen bank
in Bangladesh to replicating Grameen principle internationally;
and from holding the first micro-credit summit in
Washington DC to his vision of a poverty-free world.
Dr. Yunus reminisces about his growing up on 20
Boxirhat Road, in the heart of the old business
district of Chittagong, and pays respect and homage
to his parents and teachers. About his father he
writes: “My father was a devout Muslim all
his life, and made three pilgrimages to Mecca. His
square tortoise-shell glasses and his white beard
made him look like intellectual, but he was never
a bookworm. With his large family and his successful
business, he had no time or much inclination to
look over our lessons. He usually dressed all in
white, white slippers, white paijama pants,
a white tunic and a white prayer cap. He divided
his time between his work, his prayers and his family
life.”
Remembering his mother, who taught young Yunus the
traits of discipline, love, charity importance of
compassion, and kindness, he writes, “My mother,
Sofia Khatun, was a strong and decisive woman. She
was the disciplinarian of the family, and once she
bit her lower lip and decided something, we knew
nothing would budge her. She wanted us all to be
as methodical as her. She was full of compassion
and kindness, and probably the strongest influence
on me. She always had money put away for any poor
relations who visited us from distant villages.
It was she, through her concern for the poor and
the disadvantaged, who helped me discover my destiny,
and she who most shaped my personality…my
mother did something else which fascinated me. She
worked on some of the jewelry to be sold in our
shop. She often gave a final touch to earrings and
necklace by adding a bit of velvet or woolen pompoms
to the end of the ribbon, or by attaching braided
colored strands. Amazed, I watched her long thin
hands work and make truly beautiful ornaments. It
was this money she earned on the side that she gave
away to the neediest relative, friends or neighbors
who came to her for help.”
Recalling his extracurricular activities and a teacher
who electrified his imagination, Dr. Yunus writes,
“I especially recall a train trip across India
on the way to the first Pakistan National Boy Scout
Jamboree in 1953, when we stopped to visit important
historical sites and relics. The journey became
a time-travel through our history, almost a pilgrimage
to meet our own true selves. Most of the time we
sang and played, but standing in front of the Taj
Mahal in Agra, I caught our assistant headmaster,
Quazi Sirajul Huq, a man loved by his students,
weeping silently. The tears were not for the monument,
nor for the famous lovers who were buried there,
nor for the poetry etched on the monument in white
marble, no. He said he was weeping for our destiny,
the burden of history that we were carrying and
not knowing what to do with it. I was only thirteen,
but I was infected by his passionate imagination.
Quazi sahib became my friend, philosopher and guide
for life…Quazi sahib electrified my imagination.
He had a sublime moral influence on all of us in
his care. He taught us always to aim high, and channeled
our passions and restlessness. He did not do this
through preaching, but through deeds and heart-to-heart
communication which had a lifelong effect on me.”
Recalling his campus years (1965-72) at Vanderbilt
University in the US, Dr. Yunus admires his mentor
Professor Georgescu-Roegen: “He was an old-fashioned
European teacher who kept his distance. The books
he wrote were much too erudite, impossible to understand,
but he spoke clearly and concisely. He was a mathematician,
a philosopher and had been finance minister of Romania
until 1948, when he had to leave and seek political
asylum in the United States. He spoke so beautifully
that, taken word for word, his classes were a work
of art. I studied advanced statistics with him as
well as economic theory and Marxism... As his teaching
assistant, I learned to respect precise models which
showed me how certain concrete plans can help us
understand and construct the future. I also learned
that things are never as complicated as we imagine
them to be. It is only our arrogance which seeks
to find complicated answers to simple problems.”
After earning a PhD from Vanderbilt University,
he returned to Chittagong and discovered the wide
gap that existed between the elegant theories of
economics and real life. He writes, “The year
1974 was the year which shook me to the core of
my being. Bangladesh fell into the grips of a famine…I
used to get excited teaching my students how economics
theories provided answers to economic problems of
all type. I got carried away by the beauty and elegance
of these theories. Now all of sudden I started having
an empty feeling. What good were all these elegant
theories when people died of starvation on pavements
and on doorsteps?”
Professor Yunus started his poverty relief work
in Jobra village located in the vicinity of the
University of Chittagong. Regarding Jobra village’s
close proximity to the University, he reveals an
interesting story: “I was lucky that Jobra
was close to the campus. Field Marshal Ayub Khan,
the then President of Pakistan, had taken power
in a military coup in 1958 and ruled until 1969
as a military dictator; because of his strong distaste
for students, whom he considered troublemakers,
he decided that all universities founded during
his rule had to be located away from urban areas
so that students would not be able to disrupt the
centers of population with their political agitation…I
decide I would become a student all over again,
and Jobra would be my university. The people of
Jobra would be my teachers.”
Professor Yunus, with the help of his colleagues
and students, started to visit families in the Jobra
village to collect facts about poverty and to offer
help to the people. He recounts his meeting with
Sufia Begum, a village resident who borrowed money
to make bamboo stools to earn a living to feed his
family. He discovered that Sofia Begum was so poor
that she had to borrow the equivalent of 22 US cents
to buy bamboo. After paying her debt at a very high
finance charge she was left with only 2 cents of
profit to take care of her daily family needs. His
work in Jobra village further revealed that 42 families
in the village were living in poverty because they
did not have $27 to sustain themselves. He was distressed
by what he discovered. He writes, “My God,
my God, all this misery in all these forty-two families,
all because of the lack of $27! I exclaimed…
My mind wouldn’t let this problem lie. I wanted
to be of help to these forty-two able bodied, hard-working
people…Usually when my head touches the pillow,
I fall asleep within seconds, but that night I lay
in bed feeling ashamed that I was part of a society
which could not provide $27 to forty-two able bodied,
hard-working skilled persons to make a living for
themselves…My thinking up until then had been
ad hoc and emotional. I needed to create an institutional
response on which they could rely.”
Professor Yunus gave $27 out of his pockets to the
forty-two families, and thus Jobra became the test
bed for his micro credit experiment to take people
out of the shackles of poverty, and the rest is
history.
Dr. Yunus started his experimental micro credit
enterprise in 1977 and by 1983 the Grameen Bank
(http://www.grameen-info.org) was officially established.
The Grameen Bank started to provide credit to the
poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh without
any collateral. The credit proved to be a cost effective
weapon to eliminate poverty by acting as a catalyst
for improving socio-economic conditions. As of May
2006, Grameen Bank has provided loans to 6.67 million
borrowers, 97 percent of whom are women. With 2247
branches, Grameen Bank provides services in 72,096
villages, covering more than 86 percent of the total
villages in Bangladesh. Today Grameen bank is a
$2.5 billion enterprise and its micro credit model
has been replicated in more than 50 countries around
the world.
In 1996, commenting on the success of micro credit
model, James Wolfenshohn, president of World Bank,
acknowledged, “Micro-credit programs have
brought the vibrancy of the market economy to the
poorest villages and people of the world. This business
approach to the alleviation of poverty has allowed
millions of individuals to work their way out of
poverty with dignity.” It is important to
observe that Dr. Yunus achieved this success without
accepting any help from international donor agencies
or by compromising his principles.
Reflecting on the philosophy of Grameen, Dr. Yunus
states, “Grameen is committed to social objective
--- eliminating poverty, providing education, health-care
employment opportunities, achieving gender equality
by promoting the empowerment of women, ensuring
the well-being of the elderly. Grameen dreams about
a poverty-free, dole-free world.”
Regarding the idea of the clash of civilization,
Dr. Yunus observes, “Some of the West’s
great geostrategists and thinkers see the world
locked in future cultural struggles, such as Christianity
versus Islam. They seem to think it is inevitable
and are quite pessimistic because of the militancy
of certain extremist regimes. We at the Grameen
do not look at the world this way. We make loans
to Muslim, Hindu, Christian and Buddhist women alike…there
is no reason for religious or cultural wars if the
poorest can, through their own self-help, their
own micro-capital, develop and become independent,
active, thinking and creative human beings. Let’s
hope that the West, champion of capitalism, will
see and learn the lessons we have learned here in
Bangladesh.”
On poverty, the missing issue in Economics, Dr.
Yunus poses a question to economists: “Why
have economists been silent when banks insisted
on the ridiculous and extremely harmful generalization
that poor are not creditworthy? Nobody can provide
a convincing answer. Because of this silence and
indifference, financial institutions could impose
financial apartheid and get away with it.”
Dr. Yunus observes that Economics textbooks have
no use for the word “self-employment: “That
is what has created trouble in real life; just because
our textbooks banished this word, policy-makers
banished it from their minds too…In many Third
World countries, an overwhelming majority of people
make a living through self-employment. Not knowing
where to fit this phenomenon into their analytical
framework, economists lumped it into a catch-all
category called the ‘informal sector.’
Because they did not have the analytical tools to
cope with the situation, they concluded that it
was not a sensible one: as soon as these countries
could eliminate this informal sector, the better
off they would be. What a shame!”
In the final section of the book, Dr. Yunus poses
a question: “Can we really create a poverty-free
world? A world without third-class or fourth-class
citizens, a world without a hungry, liberate barefoot
underclass?” And then he answers, “Yes,
we can, in the same way we can create ‘sovereign’
states, or ‘democratic’ political systems,
or ‘free market economies’. A poverty-free
world would not be perfect, but it would be the
best approximation of the ideal. We have created
a slavery-free world, a polio-free world, an apartheid-free
world. Creating a poverty-free world would be greater
than all these accomplishments, while at the same
time reinforcing them. This would be world that
we could all be proud to live in.”
The book is co-authored by Alan Jolis, an American
journalist who has authored Love and Terror,
Speak Sunlight and other children’s novels.
He has also been a contributor to Vogue,
Architectural Digest, the Wall Street
Journal, the International Herald Tribune
and other publications.
The book also has three appendices containing information
related to the Grameen’s Balance Sheet, analysis
of some of the most popular Grameen loans, and the
Grameen family of companies.
Dr. Yunus’s autobiographical account is a
work of historical importance. For the first time
in history an economist has tried to address the
flaws of economic theory by devising and implementing
a micro credit based model to eliminate poverty.
It is a brilliant book, a must read for all those
who care and have passion to end the sufferings
of fellow human beings.
As Rumi said, “Try being poor for a day or
two and find in poverty double riches.” Indeed,
Dr. Yunus has dedicated his life for championing
the problems of the poor and has found his riches
in the form of a Nobel Prize.
In Banker to the Poor, Dr. Yunus has documented
the development and implementation of an effective
model for eliminating poverty. Now the onus is on
the world leaders to formulate policies to achieve
a poverty-free world before the middle of the 21st
century.
[Dr. Ahmed S. Khan (khan@dpg.devry.edu) is a senior
Professor in the EET Dept. at DeVry University,
Addison, Illinois. He is the author of ‘The
Telecommunications Fact Book,’ and the co-author
of ‘Technology and Society: A Bridge to the
21st Century’.]
Book Information
Title: Banker to the Poor
Publisher: The University Press Limited, Dhaka,
Bangladesh
ISBN: 984 05 1467 9
Copyright Year: 1998
Format: Hardcover, 313 pages
The Book was first published in French in 1997 by
Editions JC Lattes. The first South Asian edition
was published in 1998 by the University Press Limited,
Dhaka and was reprinted in 2001. A condensed version
titled Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and
the Battle Against World Poverty (Paperback) was
published in 1999 & 2003 by the Public Affairs
Books (www.publicaffarisbook.com) New York.
Condensed Version Title/Information
Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle
Against World Poverty (Paperback)
ISBN: 1586481983
ISBN-13: 9781586481988
Pub. Date: 1999, October 2003
Format: Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Public Affairs Books (www.publicaffarisbook.com),
New York
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