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Pleasures and provocation’s FT critics and guest writers choose the books they enjoyed most in 1998 Banker to the poor by Muhammad Yunus with Alan Jolis (Aurum press £18.95) is the story of an extraordinary achlevervent. In 1974 Professor Yunus, a Bangladesh economist Interviewed in a poor village a woman stoolmaker who dad every week to borrow the equivalent of 15d (6p) to buy the raw bamboo. When this waw paid back she dah made a penny profit. Professor Yunus saw in her the dilemma of poor people all over the world, and after rebuffs, scorn, and scepticism from orthodox banks, set up the Grameen Bank, which lends minute sums of money to people who cannot get credit. "Micro credit" was born. This scheme has riumphantly worked and whole districts in many countries have been transformed. The ideals of the sixties are caching up with capitaslism and the company of the future will, of necessity, be driven by the values of its customers It is no accident that some of the campaigning organisations that have carried elements of the sixties counter- cultural agenda into the nineties , including greenpeace and amnesty, have decided to work with pioneering companies In the intervening decades, business has evolved into the most powerful institution on the planet, Business, however, does not operate ina vacuum, Nor is it totally impervious to the values of a growing proportion of its employees, customers. consumers and investors,The values shift, in short, is also catching up with capitalism. Indeed. one of te most exciting books I have read recently is Liber ating the Corporate Soul( Butter worth- Heinemann) by richard Barrett. formerly " values co-ordinator" at the World Bank. He has sincemoved on to promote the values revolution in business. Early on, Barrrett quotes Levi Strauss CEO Robert Haas" In the next century a company will stand or fall on its values" So it is hardly surprising that we now see many of the values that surfaced in the sixties beginning to infiltrate some corporate board room. The central point , however is that: corporations don’t transform. peopople do. Corporate trnsformation is fundamentally about personal transformation. Nor is this simply a trend in the developed world, although the bright spots in the south are harder to find, One is the Grameen Bank Bank, described in Banker T The Poor (Aurum Press0 the autobiography of its founder, Muhammad Yunus. The story of the bank is worth repeating. In 1974. Professor Yunus under went his own personal transforamtion. He had taken his students on a field trip to a poor village, they interviewed a woman who made bamoo stools, learning that she had to borrow money at sucha high rate of interest that there was little profit left. So she was unable to raise and har prnly above substence level Yunus ient the equibalent of f17 from his own pocket to 42 basket weavers. He found that even with such a small amount it was possible for them not simply to survive but also to create the spark of initiative and enterprise needed to Pull themselves out of poverty Against the abvice of of the banks and government, he carried on viginv micro loans " and in 1983 formed the Grameen Bank Bank meaning " village bank’ In Bangladesh today Grameen has more than 1,000 branches, employs over 12,000 staff, and serves two million borrowers in some 37,000 villages. Of the borrowers,94 per cent are women and more than 98 per cent of loans are repaid, a recovery rate higher than for any other banking system, Anyone who doubts the potential power of " new capitalism " to transform the lives of the poor or the world for better should read this book. THIS IS an amazing account of the way in which one man with a vision and the right values can turn the established order on its ear. But however powerful such revolutions in commercial and business culture may eventually be, they need to be accompanied by parallel revolutions in government and governance. It is a sad fact of human nature that for every Humammad Yunus there are always competitors ready and willing to cut financial sosial or envirounmental corners John Elkingtion is chairmdns of strategy consultants sustain Ability Ltd. www. sustasinability . co. Uk His latest book. co-authred with julia Hailes . is Manual 2000 Lief Choices For The Future You Want (Hodder & Stoughton,E9.99) The Express October 29,1998, London The man who finally gave money- lending an honourable name For A banker, Muhammad Yunus has a novel way of doing business. If you are employed or won land, he will refuse to lend you any money if, on the other hand, you are destitute, you can borrow from his bank without conditions on a fixed- interest rate and he’ ll never send the bailiffs after you if you default. No nabk would envy this man his clients: be3ggars the illiterate and ill- educated. Yet ,any Western bank must envy his repayment rate, It is 98 per cent- higher than any oter banking system in the world. " Most banks would conjsider these people uncredit worthy" he says, smiling broadly " I put it another way It is the banks who are unpeopleworthy" This sort of statement is typical of Professor Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who one day, in a year of mamine, looked out of his narrow university window and saw a world that the elegant theories of his textbooks had no explanation for, Now his aim is simple but audacious: he wants poverty to reside only in museumxs like other dark things of our past; slavery, the Holocaust, apartheid: "So that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long" In these days of the Third Way, Which turns out only to be abit of one old way thrown in with a bit of anothder , it is no wonder this man, a true visionarhy, is feted by Western governments, borrowed from by the Clintons, and studied by Millbank. He admits that, on first sight, his methods may seem something of a leap of faith and yet his proof is that they work. The concept is very simple: a bank which lends to the destitute at a reasonable rate and allows them to escape the stranglehold of poverty. Professor Yunus set up his own bank- the Grameen Bank or village bank- to achieve his ends. Starting as an experiment in a Bangladeshi village in 1974, it his grown to encompass 1,112 branches serving 2.3 million borrowers in 1998. There are many banks world wide whio now provide " micro – credit " and Grameen today has clones in 59 countries, from America, where it helps the poor of Arkaneas and those on several Indian reservations, toFrench inner cities. A private Member’s Bill later this year in the commons will look at how micro- credit can work in Britain. His supporters here range from Prince Charles to Clare Short " One in four human beings are living on the edge of human existence;" says the Development Secretary " These are incredibly skilled and brave and courageous people. Professor Yunus is contributing to freeing them from poverty" In his introduction to Yunus’s autobiobiography , published yesterday, the Prince describes" an inspiring, entertaining and confident interlocutor who sent me away with a new and inspiring sense of whAt can be achieved" More than 90 per scent of Grameen’s Bangladeshi borrowers are women. This, ina country where their low status means most have never controlled any money I their lives" Wome make up most of the poor in Bangladesh," says Professor Yunus " How could I ignore them?" Ammajan Amina, an illiterate beggar in her 40s, was one of Grameen Bank’s first clients. Of her six children, four had died of hunger or disease and her huband had spent most of their assets pm trying to find a cure for an illness which took his life. After his death, Amina was left with only her house and two daughters tofeed. For awhile, she sold home – made cakes and biscuits but ran out of money to buy ingredients and turned to beggfing. One night, she came home to find her brother- in- low had sold their tin roof. Later, mon- soon rains destroyed the mud walls and she found her elder daughter dead in the rubble. Whwn Grameen workers found her, she was hungry and desperate. The bank lent her some money to start making bamboo baskets, She made a profit, repaid her loan and then took anothder to develop her business. She was now a businesswoman, not a beggar" We have two million such life stories." says Professor Yunus’ " One for each of our members." The professor was born in 1940 , the son of a goldsmith in Chittagong, then in East Bengal, one of nine children. he excelled at school and, in 1965, was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to take a phd at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. He married and had a child with an American woman but she was miserable living in Bangladesh. In 1980, he married his second wife, Afrozi, a Bangladeshi teacher and researcher in advanced physics. They now have a child, Deena. It is his mother who had the most profound influence on his life, however. He had watched her, as he grew up, making exdtra jewellery which she sold so she would always have a little to give to poor relatives. This imbued in him the sense that having enough yourself was only as improtant as helping others. His epiphany came while he was teaching at Chittagong University during the 1974 famine and skeletal figures began arriving in nearby towns and villages. "I wanted to run away from these theories, from my textbooks." he says." I wanted to discover the real- life economics played out in the neighbouring village ,The people of Jobra would become my teachers." Jobra became both his laboratory and his road to Damascus as he began to take what he calls a "worm’s eye view " of the lives of the destitute. What he found was tremendous potential. " In such conditions the fact these people are even alive means they are skilled, yet they are treataed as if they have nothings to offer." he says. His economist’s eye also began to see how the poorest wer4e enslaved to loan sharks who lent money at 10 per cent interest per week , sometimes even per day. They were allowed just enough to keep them alive but not enough to escape the money lenders. He realised that, if someone were to lend the people of Jobra just L17, the villlageers would escape the trap. He lent it himself and saw a sudden change:" Gredit unlocked their potential and their humanity" Slowly, Professor Yunus became the guarantor for many poor people , while he tried to persuade a bank to take them on. Frustrataed by refusals. he set up his won. The poor became its clients and its shareholders. IT HAS gone on to establish a conter- cultutre, a Grameen way" which has radically altered Bangladeshi life. Participants form groups of five and agree to 16 principles , including promising not to pay dowries and to send their children to school, but there are no penalties for failing to hphold them except a loss of pride and peer pressure. If someone defaults, the other four in the group are encouraged to find out how the person has got them selves into such trouble and to help them out. Muhammad Yunus is something of a culf figure in Bangladesh, the sort of man people whisper mightone day lead the country. He pays himself a modest salary, wears simple clothes, owns a credit card he has never used and lives ina two- bedroom flat. "He doesn’t even have air – conditioning." says one puzzled Bangladeshi. " He doesnot even take bribes! He knows everyone thinks he’s crazy but he allso knows that what he is doing works. "A world without poverty," he says, "When I mention this to people, I see a little smile hiding their chynicism. The thing is, I know it can be achieved" Japan Times Tokyo Oct. 7, 1998, Japan Lender to poor finds happy returns Muhammad Yunus is not uour typical banker. You won’t catch him traipsing around in designer suits or marching briefcase in hand through the corporate halls looking for new clients. No, this simply dressed Bangladeshi banker marches to a different beat: he strives to lend money to the poor-the more impoverished the beter. The surprising success of his uncondentional approach known as microcerdit, has thrust Yunus founder and director of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, into the global limelight. Now he is increaslingly capturing the attention of those in Japan. "Grameen Bank is a very different bank from the banks you are familiar with. Convenional banking is based on the principle of the more you have the more you can get Yunus said, "We kind of reversed it saying that the less you have the higher priority you get and if you can prove that you have nothing you get the highest priority. While in Tokyo to speak at an International Cooperation Day symposium and promote his autobiography released in Japanese Sept. 28, Yunus also met with government officials. Twenty one years ago Yunus began experimenting with giving small loans to the very poor to promote selfemployment and reduce poverty. Grameen Bank now has branches in more than half of the nations villages and has lent over $2.5 billion. More than 90 percent of the bank’s borrowers are women and the repayment rate on loans exceeds 95 percent. And Japan as the world’s and Banladesh’s largest aid contributor could learn from this Yunus contends. "The Japanese government is a very important actor in the international foreign as sistance area, but they don’t behave that way. They do it very quietly, "Yunus said. Only within the last three or four years has Japan started to address social issues and only a tiny fraction of the money allotted goes toward microlending he said. A rethinking of aid dis bursement focusing on lending to the poor, rether than on conventional projects such as building roads, bridges and hospitals is called for, he said. "Ideally we would like to see the bulk of their foreign assistance go into microcredit, becouse it addresses the issue of poverty very directly individually, "he said. While the current financial crisis increases on a daily basis the number of people living in poverty, it also provides an opportunity, he said. "We have tro redesign the financial system so that it can become a universal service not a service to the privileged few. Particularly in the context of the present financial crisis, we have an opportunity to redesign financial institutions." The Times, November 27, 1998, London Credit, shared human right In 1976 an economics professor at the University of Chitagong in Bangladesh, decided in take action and help 42 hardworking but severely impoverished individuals at the nearby village of Jobra, by lending them a total of $27. Twenty two years later micro-credit program’s in 50 countries around the world have loaned some $ 22 million to the poorest of the poor. The author’s primary thesis is that credit is a basic human right and should therefore be available to all in particular to the very poor. Who in most cases have insufficient collateral to secure loans from banks and are thus unable to break the cycle of poverty. Encountering numerous obstacles in implementing his idea of directing loans to the poor via the traditional banks, Yunus created his own "Grameen Bank" (gram meaning village), with branches located in small rural sediments. Lending crimeless" represent the heartbeat of micro credit enterprise. With groups of five individuals working together to oversee and guarantee their own loans. Tantamount to this is the notion of shared or reciprocal responsibility: if one defaults then all are held responsible. Profits too are shared providing a mutual impels to a system that has manifested multiple positive social repercussions since its inception in 1976. Most micro Credit borrowers are women: women who continue to be a marginalized, latent force in so many communities today Micro-credits endowment of women with economic power has profoundly affected their status providing a focus for increased self confidence independence and the achievement of equality on every level. Micro-credit, than represents a fundamental challenge to existent gender relations in many societies. Women in developing countries generally have less access to capital than men are of inhering social status and have less involvement in major family decision. It is however women who deal with day –to-day domes he altar-making ends meet in providing for the family. Clearly the idea of micro credit has captured attention on the world stage and Yunus has been instrumental in achieving this. On a note of caution (one shared by Yunus) grant funds such as those normally available from donor agencies can be damaging to the health of the development of micro credit if applied too liberally and with out concern for the effects on the micro financial institutions themselves. Their long -term sustainability depends on gaining access to commercial funds not on becoming dependent on grants. Their capital requirements are best met through the market from commercial sources. The problem therefore is how to use public funds effectively to encourage partnerships between large commercial sources of funds and effective micro financial institutions. Although some institutions perform better than the commercial banks. there is still scope for grant funds to help those weaker ones build their capacity for management and to reach the poor more effectively. The book is directed on the one hand at a professional readership at those working closely with issues of development assistance and on the other at a far wider audience one interested in the eradication of poverty on a global scale. With numerous references to case studies Banker to the poor offers a range of vivid insights into inspiration behind the development of his micro credit system. His profound sense of social responsibility which leads his to shun a detached academic life is repeatedly illustrated in both his autobiography and his system of credit we are granted access to an individual genuinely concerned with the fate of the poor one whose pragmatic insights into the processes of the world economic system contribute hugely to a grass roots model for development. Yunus micro credit system expends to a whole range of social concerns such as gender and social equality birth control education hygiene sanitation housing communications and environmental concerns. In so many ways the authors brainchild has revolutionized community relations through making credit available to those previously considered beyond (or below) the reach of conventional systems. But all is not rosy in the world of micro finance. An inexpensive programme that directly touches poor people and develops self reliance and entrepreneurial skills is of enormous appeal, but is no substitute for health and education schemes that tackle poverty at its most basic level. Yunus under stands this and has tried to remedy the situation by branding out in complementary directions, with Grameen phone or the establishment of a Grameen Health care system. But as much as it can expand micro credit cannot replace all see for development assistance implemented by government donors and international institution. Poverty alleviation is now a political priority of the European Union and of other donors and international organizations. The Masticate Treaty clearly sets out the goal of fostering the campaign against poverty in the developing world. A concerted effort is necessary by all partners involved donor countries recipient (governments and civil society) and international agencies to attain this far reaching goal. The timing of this publication coincides with the award of the Nobel prize in economics to another gifted Asian economist Amartya Sen. Social scientists in Asia have taken the lead in changing the way we think about development and especially the way we can approach the goal of eradicating poverty. Often leaving academic in order to pursue the application of their theories as in the case of Yunus they have been able to find practical ways of empowering the poor to escape their conditions. Development his to rains in the future will reflect on the reasons why this particular movement arose in Asia. he Guardian October 31, 1998, London Credit where credit’s due There are many ways for people to die, but somehow dying of starvation is the most unacceptable of all. It happens in slow motion. Second by second the distance between life and death becomes smaller. At one point life and death are in such close proximity one can hardly see the difference and one literally doesn’t know if the mother and child prostrate on the ground are of this world or the next Death happens so quietly so inexorable, you don’t even hear it. And all this happens because a person does not have a handful of food to eat at each meat. The tiny baby, who does not yet understand the mystery of the world, cries and cries and finally falls asleep without the milk tit needs so badly. The next day maybe it won’t even have the strength to cry. I used to get excited teaching my university students in Bangladesh how economic theories provided answers to economic problems of all types. I got carried away by the beauty and elegance of these theories. yet all of a sudden I started having an empty feeling What good were all these elegant theories when people died of starvation on pavements and on doorsteps? My classroom now seemed to me like a cinema where you could relax because you knew that the good guy in the film would ultimately win. In the classroom I knew, right from the beginning, that each economic problem would have an elegant ending. But when I came out of the classroom I was faced with the real world. Here good guys were mercilessly beaten and trampled. I wanted to understand the reality around a poor person’s existence and discover the real life economics that were played out every day in the neighboring village, and went to Jobra. I decided I would become a student all over again and Jobra would be my university. One day as my colleague and I were making our rounds in Jabra we stopped at a completely rundown house. We saw a woman working with bamboo making a stool. She was squatting on the dirt floor of her veranda under the low rotten thatched roof of her house totally absorbed in her work. She was holding the half finished stool between her knees while plaiting the strands of bamboo cane. Children were running around naked in the yard. Neighbors appeared and watched us wondering what we were doing there. She was in her early twenties thin with dark skin, black eyes She wore a red sari and could have been any one of a million women who labour every day from morning to night in utter destitution. Her name was Sufia Beggum and she was 21 years old. "Do you own this bamboo?" I asked her. "Yes" How do you get It? I buy it How much does the bamboo cast you? "Five taka" That was 13 pence Do you have five taka? No I borrow it from the paikars. The middlemen? What is your arrangement with them? I must sell my bamboo stools back to them at the end of the day so as to repay my loan. That way what is left over to me is my profit" How much do you sell it for? Five take and 50 paisa profit? She nodded. That came to a profit of just over a penny. "And could you borrow the cash and buy your own raw material?" "Yes but the money lender would demand a lot. And people who start with them only get poorer." How much do the money lenders charge?’ It depends. Sometimes they charge 10 percent week. I even have a neighbour who is paying 10 percent per day". Sufia set to work again, because she did not want to lose any time talking with us. I watched her small brown hands plaiting the strands of bamboo as they had every day for months and years on end. This was her livelihood. She squatted barefoot on the hard mud. Her fingers were callused her fingers were callused her nails black with grime. It seemed to me that sufia’s status as virtually a bonded slave was never going to change if she could not find that five taka to start with Credit could bring her that money. She could then sell her products in a free market and could get a much better speed between the cast of her materials and her sale price. The next day I called in a university student who collected data for me and I asked her to assist me in making a list of how many in Jobra, Like Sufia, were borrowing from traders and missing out on what they should have been earning from the fruits of their labours. Within a week we had prepared a list It named 42 people who in total had borrowed 856 taka a total of less than 17. My god my God all this misery in all these 42 families all because of the lack of 17" I exclaimed. My mind wouldn’t let this problem lie. I wanted to be of help to these 42 able bodied hard working people. I kept going round and round the problem like a dog worrying his done. If lent them 17 they could sell their products to anyone; and would not be limited to the usurious practices of the traders and money lenders. I lent them 17 and said they could repay me whenever they could afford to. Over the next week, it struck me that what I had done was not sufficient because it was only a personal and emotional solution. I had simply let 17 but what I had to do was to provide an institutional solution. That was the beginning of it all. I was not trying to become a moneylender, I had no intention of lending money to anyone; all I really wanted was to solve an immediate problem. Even to this day I still view myself my work and that of my colleagues as devoted to solving the same immediate problem the problem of proverty which humiliates and denigrates everything that a human being stands for. We did not know anything about how to run a bank for the poor so we had to learn from scratch. I wanted to cover all aspects of rural Lives such as trading small manufacturing retailing and even selling door to door. I want this to be a rural bank not a bank merely concerned with crops and farms. So I called it Grameen Bank which comes from the word gram and means village I soon discovered the worlds basic banking principle namely that The more you have the more you get and conversely the If you don’t have it you don’t get it. Our clients do not need to show how large their savings are and how much wealth they have they need to prove how poor they are how little savings they have. The my amazement and surprise the repayment of loans by people who borrow without collateral is much better than those whose borrowings are secured by enormous asselt Indeed more than 98 per cent of our loans are repaid because the poor know this is the only opportunity they have to break out of their poverty. And they don’t have any cushion whatsoever to fall back on. If they fall foul of this one loan how will they survive? On the other hand people who are well off don’t care what the law will do to them because they know how to manipulate it. People at the bottom are afraid of everything so they want to do a good job because they have to. They have no choice. In structuring our own loans I made the payments so small that the borrower would not miss the money, would not even notice it. This was a way to overcome the psychological barrier of parting with all that money". I decided to make it a daily payment. The monitoring would be easier I would be able to tell right away who was paying and who was falling behind in their payments. I also thought it would enhance self discipline among people who had never borrowed before in their lives and would give them the confidence that they could manage it. Slowly we developed our own delivery/ recovery mechanism and of course we made many mistakes along the way. Today we have arrived at a simple repayment mechanism that all our borrowers understand almost immediately: one year loans equal weekly instilments repayment starts one week after the loan interest rate of 20 percent (far less than the usurers) repayment amounts to 2 percent per week for 50 weeks. Now we have more than 12000 employees and 1,112 branches in Bangladesh. The staff meet more than 2300000 borrowers face to face to each week on their doorstep. Each month we lend out more than $35 million in tiny loans. At the same time almost, a similar amount comes back to us in repayments. If Grameen was to work we had to trust our clients. From the very first day we decided that in our system there would be no room for the police. We never use the judiciary in seeking repayment of our loans. We assume that we know how to do our business if we don’t we should get out of banking and go into some other venture. We do not involve lawyers or any outsiders. It is our business and we try to ensure repayments as best we can that is our job. There is no legal instrument between the lender and the borrower. We feel our relationship is with people not with papers. We build up the human link based on trust Grameen succeeds or fails depending on how strong our personal relationship is with the borrowers. Our experience with had debt is less than 1 percent. Even then Grameen does not conclude that a defaulting borrower is a bad person. Rather that their personal circumstances were so hard that thy could not pay back their tiny loan. So why should we run after lawyers for them to give us the blue pieces of paper, the yellow pieces of paper, the pink pieces of paper? Bad loans of 0.5 percent is the cost of doing business and it also represents a constant reminder of what we need to improve in order to succeed. Gradually we focused almost exclusively on lending to women If the goals of economic development include improved standards of living removal of poverty, access to dignified employment and reduction is inequality then it is quite natural to start with women. They constitute the majority of the poor the under employed and the economically and socially disadvantaged. And since they were closer to the children women were also our key to the future of Bangladesh. This was not easy. The first and most formidable opposition came from the husbands. Next the mullahs. Then the professional people and even government officials. Being poor in Bangladesh is tough for everyone but being a poor woman is toughest of all when she is given the smallest opportunity she struggles extra hard to get out of poverty. A Poor woman in our society is totally insecure she is insecure in her husband’s house because he can throw her any time he wishes. He can divorce her by merely saying three times "I divorce thee I divorce thee, I divorce thee" She cannot read and write and generally she has never been allowed out of her house to earn money, ever if she has wanted to. She is insecure in her in laws house for the same reason as she was in her parents house they are just waiting to get her out so they will have one less month to feed. If she is divorced and returns to her parents she becomes a disgrace and is unwanted there. So given any opportunity at all a poor woman in our society wants to build up her security her financial security. From our experience, it became evident that destitute women adapted quicker and better to the self help process than men. Poor women had the vision to see further and were willing to work harder to get out of poverty because they suffered the most the women paid more attention, prepared their children to have better lives and wee more consistent in their performance then men. Money going though a woman in a household brought more benefits to the family as a whole than money entering the household through a man. The life story of Ammajan Amina one of our first borrowers illustrates what micro credit can do for a street beggar. Of her six children four had died of hunger or disease. Only two daughters survived. Her husband much older than her was ill. for several years he had spent most of the family assets on trying to find a cure. After his death all that Amina had left was the house. She was in her forties which is old by Bangladesh standards illiterate and had never earned an income before. Her in laws tried to expel her and her children from the house where she had lived for the 20 years, but she refused to leave. She tried selling home made cakes and biscuits door to door but one day she returned to find her brother in law had sold her tin roof and the buyer was busy removing it Now the rainy season started and she was cold, hungry and too poor to make food to sell. All she had she used to feed her own children. Because she was a proud woman, She begged but only in nearby villages, As she had no roof to protect her house the monsoon destroyed her mud walls. One day when she returned she found her house had collapsed and she started screaming: "Where is my daughter? Where is my baby?" She found her older child dead under the rubble of her house. When my colleague Nurjahan met her in 1976 she held her only surviving child in her arms. She was hungry, heartbroken and desperate. There was no Question of any money lender much less a commercial bank giving her credit. But with small loans she started making bamboo baskets and remained a borrower to the end of her days. Now her daughter is a member of Grameen. Today we have more than two million such life stories one for each of our members. The Washington Times June 26,1999 There are some people in the world who just don’t seem to fi frankly most of the time they don’t even try to Just when you’ve got them ideologically typeset as liberal, they do something conservative. When you’re absolutely confident that their ideas are thoroughly absured and unworkable they stun the world with their success and practicallty. If that gente of human being confuses you It’s probahly best you don’t focus too much on Muhammad Yunus. of Bangladesh Naglivllie and the would. As the founder and facilitator of the " mlero credll movement ‘’ that laswept the world aince 1976 giving loans to the poorcst of the poor and disproving shibboleth after shibboleth presumably Mr. Yunus would be in favor of welfare for the poor in industrialized countrles After all those payments too help the poor To the contrary , the soft spoken but outspeken Mr. Yunus hates welfare with an inner passion belied by his outward modesty" When we started working with inicrocredit in the rich countries the united states, the united kingdomm France norway, Sweden – people said It wouldn’t be relevant in the rich countries, I said it would be more relevant because the rich countries try to glass over the poor with weliare, I said this is inerently wrong because it takes the initiative away from people , It sucks people in and there’s no way to get out. It’s even more relevant because it’s so shameful. "Welfare is a kind of human zoo" he went on " They treat the poor like they are animals in a zoo. You feed them, but you have no usc for their human faculties. "Access to micro- credit brings out the potential in human beings" he explained " the nbility to care for yourself. At the time that I started. I didn’t have large experience , but increasingly, with what I saw, my trust in huan abilities has really grown. I saw people with no skills and all of a sudden , they just started flowering all over. This is why I have a belief that we can create a world fice of poverty- and that it is not some thing that government has to dishout" Finally, there is his success in applying his ideas to the real world and here there isno confusion at all.Mr. Yunus’ worldwide movement of providing tiny amounts of credit to the poorest of the poor and thus giving them the responsibility and the possibllity for making what they will of their lives has been a bonn fide success. As he outlines in his autobin graphical " Banker to the poor" Mr. Yunus efforts supported by his Grameen Bank Bank , which began with loans of pennles, this year will provide $2.7 billion to poor people all over the world. more than 90 percent of the loans go to women , and 98 percent of them are swiftly repaid. The movement has been central in lauching other social revelations, such as voting and population control. Most importand- and in a turn of veents that will delight many onlookers.- the Grameen Bank loans use no lawyears and no paperwokr. As Mr. Yunus, who was originally an economics Chittagong unversity. says, the word credit means trust. All well and good, but one must ask As productive us the whole micro credit movement has been (It is now operative in 60 countries), do its unusual elements represent some deeper way of thinking about social transformation in the poor countries of the East or in the inner cities of the West They do. Throughout most of this century attempts to help the poor have emanated from the center, whether the centralized core of communism or the welfare stataes of western liberal democranies. Daddy government knew best. The poor themselves were simply bypassed. What values or principles could the possibly have? With Mr. Yunus and his ideas , it became clear how barren these philosophies were His ideas, and their extraordinarily successful implementation show common aeuse and an appeal to (and a demand for) personal responsibility can work miracles As nother examplc of his reachm try texas Gov. George W. Bush, whuse already imple mented social policies include those Yunus traits of personal responsibility backed up by honest heko from government and others, Or, if that’s not enoughm try the clintons, Hillary Clinton was prominently photograhped on one of her Asian trips, in Asian dress enthusiastically endorsing micro-credit. Meanwhile, Muhammad Yunus. still only57, has set another goal for his movement Today, micro- credit reaches 12 million families, by 2005, he plans on reaching 100 million. Business for a poor tomorrow December/January, 1999 Banker to the poor Muhammad Yunus has realized that the solutions to global poverty and Third World Debt can be found in pennies. Se while the World Bank deals in millions his ‘Grameen Bank’ is looking to help 100 million people in the next 7 year via micro credit One of the most common ways to start a piece of editorial in 1998 has to have been as we approach the year 2000 followed by some tenuous link to a subject that has little to do with the golobal impact of the new millennium with the Grameen Bank however such a cliché may well be appropriate. Professor Muhammad Yunus was an economics lecturer at chittagong University in Bangladesh when in 1974 his country became engulfed in famine. All of a sudden, the highly complex economic theories that had excited him with their all encompassing answers began to lose their appeal. As he says in his autobiography: What good were these elegant theories. What good were these elegant theories when pople died of starvation on pavements and on doorsteps? What followed was Yunu’s regressing bank to student life in the small village of Jobra he learnt of the situation that hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi women and countless other people in the developing world had been unwittingly forced into In order to buy the materials that they later turn into furniture the women of the village have been borrowing money from money lenders (or mahajons) who then require the finished product to be given back to them to sell. The money the mahajons make from the sale then covers the initial loan and a fraction of any further profit is given back to the manufacture a figure that is often only of one or two pence. Yunus saw that if the residents of Jobra weren’t bound to the mahajons viscous circle then they could get the best prices possible for their products on the free market. Yunus and his team of students calculated that it would cost just 17 to give the 42 families in Jobra the chance to buy their own materials and therefore avoid the trappings of the mahajons. "I was not trying to become a money lender" says Yunus, I had no intention of lending any money. All I wanted to do was solve an immediate problem" From successful beginnings in Jobra Yunus started the Grameen Bank (from Gram meaning village) and set about granting small micro economic loans to those on or below the poverty line. After following the principles laid out in Jobra (and in the face of direct opposition from many including the World Bank) the organization has grown into a company that employs well over 12000 people and gives out loans of 35 million every week. Bearing in mind that the company asks for no collateral against its loans and is therefore based solely around trust the pay back rate of 98% that it currently enjoys in unprecedented. It is clear when looking a Grameen that is is much more than an economics issue Yunus and Grameen see credit as a basic human right which has tremendously successful knock on effects that eventually benefit the whole country.Grameen has now moved into the developed world and a scheme in Norich (which apparently has the lowest income for women in the UK) is currently underway with plans to start a similar projct in tower Hamlets. The Norwich project is currently running into trouble because it contravenes UK benefit legislation (any money a Grameen Bank – style organisation loans to an individual shuld. by law, be docked from any income from the state) Michael Rigby, Grameen’s representative for the projects in the Uk, is currently looking for a way around this problem. He feels that the uncentive structure that makes Grameen Work so weel in the developing world isn’t in place in this country, But are those in the west as trustwrthy as those on the poverty line in the developing world? " One thing that I have noticed after talking to street people." he says, "is that personal respect is a startlingly dominant trait. "Yunus himself says, "I find people trustworthy anywhere, east or west. people everwhere prefer to live in an environment of trust rather than move away from it." Poverty, it seems is a great leveller. Not only has Grameen Bank come up with a viable solution to the global problem of poverty, it has done it by focusing on the area that is so ofter neglectd in word- wide issues: the individual, Surely if a system such as this was available to the billions of poor people in the world, eradicating third world debt would become far more achievable Hungry Mind Review,1999 Where Credit Is Due REVIEW BY TOM MCINERNEY Banker to the poor: Micro- Lending and the Battle against World Poverty By Muhammad Yunus with Alan Jolis Bublic Affairs 258 pages. $24.00 ISBN: 1-891620-11-8 The mantras of commerce today – teardow, rebuild restructure, reinvent- have altered our economy dramatically. Constant change is now an undeniabnle fact of commercial life. Few dispute the underlying economic logic whereby corporate restructuring has produced robust captial gains for stock market investors at the expense of downsized workers, The dilemmas of corporate restructuring aside few have considered that practical changes paradigm shifts, and experimentalism when applied to entrenched social structures can actually improve society. The pioneering work of Huhammad Yunus founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has invilved the reinvention of one segment of the economy studiously ignored in the excitement over the new economic era: the poor, An outgrowth of Yunu’s discontent over the level of poverty in his homeland the Grameen Bank is a social experiment of sorts , one that has discredited some central assumptions about poverty. In advancing his restructuring plan, Yunus recast conventional characterization of the poor as members of a fixed, permanent nderclass incapable of becoming economically productive, Instead, he came to see them as economically savvy, capable individuals who had simply become mired in poverty and were given ‘ no chance of improving their economic base. "Poverty, he contends, "is not created by the poor…..It is created by the structures of society and the policies pursued by society ….. Change the structures …and you will see that the poor change their won lives. "In Banker to the poor, Yunus iuuustrates how the sclerotic social structures binding the poor- a result of entrenched social, class, gender, religious, and educational divisions can be " restructured " by introducing credit. The birth of the Grameen Bank occurred after a revealing conversation Yunus had with a poor woman in his villages of Chittagong, Bangladesh. As chair of the Economics Department at Chittagong University, Yunus was an expert in conventional economic the ory. which , by his own admission had little to do with the ordinary lives of the villagers who surrounded the university, One afternoon, Yunus approached a weaver of bamboo chairs who " had the tired eyes of a woman who labored every day from morning to night. "He asked her simply, "Do you own this bamboo? "Yes, " she responded. "How much does the bamboo cost You" he inquired. " five take." The equivalent of twenty – two cents. "Do you have five taka. " No, I borrow it from the pakiars. " " The middlemen? What is your arrangement with them?’ "I must sell my bamboo stools back to them at the end of the day as repayment for my loan." "How much do you sell your stools for?" "Five taka and fifty poysha. " In other words, she earned two cents a day. Yunus realized that this system virtually condemned the women and her children to a life of poverty. Her life was, in his estimation, " a form of bnonded labor, or slavery. "Despite holding a doctorate in economics from Vanderbilt University, Yunus writes that he had never understood that people suffered for such small sums. Out of this one experience microlending was born, the idea is simple. By lending small amounts of money the first loan, Yunus made totaled twenty – seven dollars disbursed among forty- two borrowers- at little or no interest, individuals are able to start small enterprises, The woman who wove chairs was able to buy the raw materials for her prodct at market value and resell finished chairs at marker price thus earning greater profits for herself, Instead of requiring borrowers totrek to a potentially intimidating formal bank, Yunus intimidating formal bank. Yunus insisted qpon visiting borrowers in their homes in rural areas where crdit was least available , by making frequent visits, yuns could identify the neediest, monitor the loans, and ensure gradual repayment, From the first loans made out of Yunu’s won pocket repayment rates on Grameen loans have remained at about 98 percent far better than traditional commercial loans. Yunu’s approach was revolutionary for another reason. In a society in which women are seen as " no good" and regularly told by their families that they should have been " killed at birth, aborted, Or starved, Yunus in sisted on lending almost exclusively to women, He found that women , when given loans, tended to think about providing for their children and house themselves, With this important gesture, yunus injected credit into a segment of the Bangladesh economy that had never known it. Loans to women as a percentage of all bank loans had been less than one percent prior to Grameen’s establishment. Over time, Yunu’s model has proved extremely successful, Since his initial loan of twenty- seven dollars made in 1976, the bank has lent over $3 million to more trhan two million people n rural Bangldesh, To date, Grameen – type projects have sprung up in places as diverse as Vietnam, china, the Philippines, and the ‘South side of Chicago. Throughout Grameen’s growth, Yunus has avoided the involvement of international development specialists, decrying them as limousine liberals, and instead has sought out private donors and foundations for support. In this way, he has aligned himself with current nonprofit economic development initiatives that cultivate private- sector, as opposed to government, funding, As happens to many original thinkers, Critics fom the left and te right have assailed Yunus. Arpagmatist intent on alleviating as much poverty as possible, he stands some where in the middle, Some passages on the extraction of surplus value from the poor by usurious lenders seem drawn from the pages of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Other passages on the disincentive to work inherent in social welfare systems could have found a suitable home in the Republican Party platform although he is a proponent of competition as an incentive for businesses , Ynuus envisions an enhanced social mission for the privatae sector, unfortunataely his arguments add little to prevailing social venture socila mission for the private sector, Unfortunately , his arguments add little to prevailing social venture concepts , Overall , Yunu’s embrace of the market system has helped make micro – lending a favorite among policy makers and business leaders – ranging from hillary Clintion to Ted Turner- because it demands minimal resources (the loans get repaid) and supports the reigning ideology of free enterprise and self reliance, Although Yunus has written a fascinating book organizationl lapses mar its presentation. Between his disarming, self – effacing stories, Yunus throws in first- person assessments of the World Bank, applications of microlending outside Bangladesh and varios policy issues, At other times important facts – for example that Grameen means ‘rural" in Bangladeshi and that Muslim clerics opposition to the bank arose at least in part from the Islamic stricture against charging interest, rather than mere knee- jerk conservatsm- crop up un expectedly ,. Despite such occasional shortcomings the strength and honesty of Yunu’s thought demand attention. As anyone who has heard Yunus speak can testify, What this book cannot show is his quiet, captivating demeanor, which verges on the spiritual To leam the secret of his man’s goodness, one looks for a sign, a indication of how and why he was called. That secret is his ability to ask ‘ Why not?" Where others have willingly supported the status quo, embraced stagnation and elevataed what is to the level of what must be,. Inherent in this ability, the very basis upon which poverty can be reinvented, is an un derlying message of hope. Tom McInemey is a lawyer and writer who lives in New York City. The Economist Microlending From tiny acorns Microlending From tiny acorns "Can we really create a poverty free world?" asks Muhammad Yunus at the end of his autobiography. Yes, he says, and he believes that he has the key; credit. According o Mr Yunus, the surest route out of destitution for the world’s poorest people lies not in aid, welfare payments or losns from development banks to governments, but in lending tiny amounts of money directly to the poor, This book the story of both Mr Yunus’s life and Grameen Bank, the institution he founded, is his account of how he has put his belief into practice. In 1974 as a young economics professor at the University of Chttagong in his native Bangladesh, Mr Yunus was appalled at the poverty in the village next to the campus. The theories he was teching he felt, did nothing to explain this misery nor to suggest how it might be ended. He decided to find out for himself. His first in terviewee, a young woman made bamboo stools with raw materials bought wih borrowed money. The finished stools had to be sold back to the moneylenders leaving scarcely enough after repaying her loan with interest to feed her family. So to make her next batch of stools, she had to retun to the moneylenders. There seemed to be no escape from the usurers’ grip. Who thought Mr Yunus, should banks not lend such women the money to buy their raw materials? Having sold her wares at a fair price on the open market, she should have enough left over to service her a debt feed her family and make a profit. To most banks this seemed and still seems a daft idea. People this poor have no collateral no business experience and are often unlettered. Surely there could be no worse credit risk? Mr Yunus disagreed and set up his own bank at first under the wing of Banladesh’s agricultural bank and some commercial banks. The poor he argues have a much greater incentive than the rich to repay heir debts it is their only way out of destitution. He claims that Grameen Bank which was incorporated in its own right in 1982 has a default rate of less than 1% far lower than conventional banks can boast Morover most of the worls’s poorest people are women. To Grameen Bank. they are more reliable customers than men, and make up 94% of the banks borrowers. the banks unusual systam of making loans which relies on peer group pressure, also pays an important part in keeping defaults down prospective borowers form groups of five who learn the banks ways together. If one member of a group defaults the other cannot get a loan. Apparently even incredibly it works. The bank employs 12000 people has 2.3m borrowers and lends $35m every month it also makes a profit. quite how to anyone steeped in conventional economics and banking is a puzzle why does Grameen succeed where ordinary banks fear to tread? Subsidised loans used to be part of the answer but Grameen nowborrows commercially. A more likely explanaton is that conventional banks cannot justify the costs of making the tiny loans often of a few dollars in which Grameen specialises. their streamlined lending systems also demand credit histories and so forth Grameen's more personal system dispenses with all that. Mr Yunus’s connections often the Bank progresses thanks to a chance meeting with an old friend are also convenient in a country governed so badly and often so coruptly. Microlending has now spread beyond Bangladesh to America and Western Europe as well as developing countries. A summit in Washington, DC last year attracted 3,000 delegates Grameen has moved beyond banking, to fish farming textile manufacture and even telecommunications and the Internet. Is Mr Yunusright to think that microlending and other Grameen –type enterprises can go a long way to rid the world of poverty? Perhaps although in the course of his book he unwittingly points to a reason why it very likely will not. In Grameen Bank’s early days, his unwilling par\trowns in the commercial banks resisted the extension of his then tiny project. It would not work, they said because the success of the venture so far had depended on Mr. yunus’s energy, and there was only one of him. This says the author, mode him angry his coworkers were just as capable and dedicated. twenty years on the growth of his ideas might seem to have proved him right. Nevertheless, microlending, for all its successes, has barely scratched the surface of the world’s poverty. To rid the globe of poverty through credit would require many, many more people with Mr Yunus’s energy and optimism. Are there really enough? The Times Visionary banker sets free powerless poor Visionary banker sets free powerless poor Bangladesh’s famous financier uses micro-credit to bring Wealth to the underprivileged of many nations, reports Rosemary Righter if you want to see a western banker after a natural disaster had wiped out half his business clients you would be in for a grim hour . that is exactly the position that muhammad yunus , the founder of Bangladesh grameen Bank is in .this years floods ,worst in the country’s history covered half the land and affected 25 million people. But professor younus is totally amazingly, unflapped . he is a paradox a personally modest man is traditional dress who lives simply in a small flat " over the shop " an ambitious businessman and visionaryconvenced that he has picked that he has picked one one of the lock that imprison the poor. His Key is credit –minute sums borrowed mainly by illiterate women set up the smallest imazinable enterprises .He calls it micro credit,and it works After 24 years spent fighting the sceptics, Grameen is a $2.5 billion 9E1.5 Billion ) business .professor younus could easily have prospered as one of the elite have prospered as one of the elite band of international economics that he has ,instead, spent much of his life puzzling and annoying with heretical ideas about the bank ability of the un bankable . his heart plainly,movingly ,soft but there is nothing soft centered about his economics .they make margaret thatcher sound like a social worker. I had just finished banker to the poor, the book he has written with alan jolis .Not only does it read as swiftly as a thriller it turns the ready science of development economics in side out it is solidly in favor of capitalist free mat kets,with the novel twist that it identified capital as the ally of the poor it distrusts dig government in general and the welfare state in particular ,it excoriates the wastage incompetence and corruption of much international aid and it is charged with the convention that all human beings, no matter what there handicap are able to help themselves . "You are the admin smith the poor " I began slightly wondering what he would say . A brilliant smile : " oh thank you ."Even so , I felt I had to qualify what I’d said .After all this man spends his life fighting poverty .I added something about the unread bits of the wealth of nations ,on social responsibility .I need not have worried ."we need far less government .It would be wonderful if you didno’t need it ,if you could just stick with it formal occasions, like your royal family. people were once afraid that they could not manage without absolute rulers. May be we will find out that except for justice, the police and defence ,we can do without government too. The public sector is on the way out. And that is because it has field " but what about the Bangladesh disaster ? How could people already so poor pick up the pieces ? This won’t destroy us. It gives us an opportunity .Just think of their enterprise . the flood water stood there for ten weeks and they survived with no income ,Using what ever capital assets , they had and now they are going back to rebuild .Disaster like this reveal the pride and strength and creativity of the poorest ; and that is what Grameen helps them to prove .Human are designed to do a lot home then merely survive," How can a bank help ?" we have standard procedures .We have to ,local cyclones and floods happen all the time ." So branches can declare a disaster area without asking Dhaka – " that would be too slow "-and turn into humanitarian agencies .Bank staff suspend loan repayments instead fan out to provide food ,Medicine,," whatever people need " but they keep a detailed record of what each person has received .And when the disaster is over, we present the bill .At first people didn’t like this –they said government will give it to us free .But we explain that if it is not free, we can help again next time : and it is the people themselves who will have made this possible .They pay back in tiny slices, about 12p a : month and that re-creates our disaster fund .Doing it that way is also more efficient ,because if relief is every one inflates their demands , and the poorest, who have least clout, will get nothing. If it is not free ,You literally count every match ." Simple, sensible rules meticulous organization ,imagination and peer pressure among borrowers: these are grameen trademarks .Its built in capacity to deal with disasters is good businees sense. It reinforces trust ,"when your Bankers have physically brought you food when you had none ,, you don’t want to cheat them ". As the floods subside, the first thing people get is their own money ,from their obligatory weekly savings with the Bank .The second is a new loan .the old one is rescheduled ,not cancelled ."we never write off a loan ;instead, we build the capacity to pay it back .If we broke that rule there would be endless petitions," Still the money to refinance more then a million borrowers at once has to come from some were .Grameen now needs a 10-15 year international loan. He will not approach aid donors " one of the allegations we have always had to contend with is that Grameen can survive only with soft loans. that is not true ,we are a solid commercial operation .This is a classic liquidity squeeze. these are not bad debts; we will get our money back just not immediately. we always do." Brave words .But for professor Younus ,the point to grameen is to prove that Banks can make a profit out of lending to the land less poor." Banks can and should lend to the disinherited of this Earth ,not only out of altruism but out of self-interest. Treating the poor as outcasts is immortal and indefensible; But it also financially stupid." For Bangladesh ,Grameen has been a cultural revolution. grameen women have fewer children , are less likelyto vote. Professor Younus says if micro credit works in his conservative country it could work anywhere .Micro credit has caught on in 58 countries .In the US ; it is a success even with the shifting poor of chicago’ toughest districts. pilot projects are starting in Britain. when he set up grameen , people first said it could not be done ,and then that it worked only because of his personal charisma .micro-credit is now a E4.2 billion industry –too big for anyone tom say it depends on one mans vision. * Aurum Press London. Finance & Development March, 2000, USA IT HAS ALWAYS struck me as odd that credit is considered a good thing, has positive connotations, is a ‘’hurrah’’word, whereas debt is considered a thing has negative connotations, is a "boo" word. Professor Muhammad Yunus , the founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, has even gone so far to call credit a human right. Yet debt and credit are inevitably the same. Would anyone advocate imposing more debt on poor people (whether small farmers microentrepreneurs, or rural woman) as part of a strategy to eradicate poverty? The enthusiatic advocates of credit sometimes forget that loans at fixed interest rates present risks to the borrowers, including the risk of being unable to repay the loan. Small farmers living near subsistence level, for example, are notoriously, and rightly, risk averse. Credit can increase their vulnerability, whereas lower interest rates will discourage saving. For people at the lowest income levels, food and health are the top priorities. Withouth better nutrition, they are unable to work. As income rises, credit becomes more important. It allows people to receive training, buy inputs, and finance working capitals. At a slightly higher income level, training is a top priority. Yunus, who strongly opposes requiring traing as a condition for credit, maintains that none of his borrrowers needed training. However, I have observed a project in which the poor underwent traing in the hope of obtaing credit afterword, but late often found the credit to be unnecessary. With a knowledge of simple bookkeeping and cost accouting, they were able to increase the profits of their microenterprises enough to dispense with credit. Yunus—a man of vision, practical ability, and drive---has written a charming and often moving autobiography about how he came to be one of the most celebrated anti-poverty campaigners of our era. He started the Grameen Bank with a personal loan of $27 to 42 poor people in his village. The loan freed them from indebtedness to moneylenders and middlemen. The bank lends small suns, mainly to poor rural woman, who use it in enterprises that will improve their childrens welfare---for example, to build fish ponds or buy dairy cows and rice husking machines, people learn to help themselves. The Gramenn Bank uses peer pressure in small groups to encourage repayments, and its repayment record is spectacular. In comparison, big borrowers are notorious for that not repaying their loans. The Grameen Bank, a nongovernmental organisation (NGO), is frequently and rightly upheld as a wonderful model for lifting the poor out of poverty and has been replicated aroud the world, including in many rich countries. Its purpose is to transfer the burden of screening and enforcement from the lending institution to borrowers’ groups. The advantage of this is that costs are reduced; a disadvantage is that small groups of borrowers are less able than credit institutions to bear risks. But the models reduces moral hazard (the possibility that individuals or institution will change their behavior in unanticipated ways as the result of a contract or agreement; for example a bank whose deposits are insured againt loss may make riskier loans and investments) and adverse selection (a problem that arises when information known to one party, to a contract is not known to the other party, causing the latter to incur major costs; for example, individuals who have the poorest health insurance), which may overide the higher social costs of the wrong party’s bearing the risks. A less widely known aspect of the Grameen Bank is that it has dificultly finding enough workers to process the loans; that turnover is high, with more workers leaving than entering; that the credit extended represents only a tiny proportion of total credit (the bank has served only 1.4 million people out of Bangladesh’s population of 120 million, or about 1 percent; the credit provided by NGOs accounts for only 0.6 percent of total lending); and, most striking of all, that some borrowers make repayments by borrowing from village userers. An NGO like the Grameen Bank cannot replace governments or commercial credit. Instead, its function shoud be to work with the government, to exert political pressure on it, to change its policies, and to pioneer models that can be replicated. It is sometimes claimed that NGOs work without and against the government. In fact the Grameen Bank relies heavily on the government and, in 1990, received 60 percent of its capital from the Bangladesh government. It would have been interesting if Yunus had explained in greater detail the obstacles the Grameen bank faces in expanding its work. Is it recruitment of village workers? Is it finance? Are there managerial constraints? Is there an absence of desire to expand? But this is a splendid book, which ends with a hopeful message:"we have created a slavery-free world, smallpox free world, an apartheid-free world. Creating a poverty free would be greter thean all this accomplishments...This would be a world that we could all be proud to live in.’’ |