The price of a dream

The price of a dream

The Story of the Grameen Bank and the Idea That Is Helping the Poor to Change Their Lives
University Press Ltd, 1966

Review by Doug Everingham

Economics Professor Mohammad Yunus met a Bangladeshi village woman making bamboo stools. She earned two cents a day to support herself. Most of her sales were to her raw materials supplier.

Yunus lent her some funds to break the crushing cycle of credit and usurious debt. Thus began the Grameen ("village") Bank two decades ago. It is apparently the most successful self-sustaining anti-poverty program.

Its millions of borrowers, 94% of them women, mostly heads of families, have no land or other collateral to raise loans from orthodox banks at market rates. The small self-start loans are 97% repaid, better than most banks get. Yunus showed no top-down foreign aid is needed to banish poverty, but a start with trust in the creativity and industry of the poorest.

The World Bank, probably shamed by its decades of failure, has twice offered a few millions from its billions to boost the work, but, as usual, it attaches auditing conditions to its low interest offers. Yunus, like a similar project in Sri Lanka, firmly turns them down. Bangladesh has had billions in foreign aid since independence in 1971 while most of its people grew poorer.

His idea has been praised in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist and Harper's. The concept is growing steadily, with hundreds of copies in North America.

The author is a Canadian graduate in commerce and journalism, living in New York. He writes articles for prominent journals, and this is his first book.

From GLW issue 276