The micro-lending Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus got his economics Ph.D. in America but learned the real thing back home, travelling village to village.
He watched one woman, for example, making bamboo stools for two pennies a day. “And I couldn’t believe,” he said, “that anybody could make such a beautiful product and earn so little.” For want of a little capital, she couldn’t buy her bamboo, and lived at the mercy of the man who traded in it.
But with a tiny loan from the bank, she was an independent entrepreneur. That was 15 years ago. Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank have made millions of loans by now, some no more than a dollar, to the poorest of the poor, mostly women.
The repayment rate is 98 percent. The moral, he says, is that what separates millions, maybe billions of people from self-sufficiency is just a few dollars worth of credit.
The father of micro-credit, Muhammad Yunus in the second hour of The Connection – and with Maria Otero, President and CEO of Accion International, a micro-lending bank that works mostly with people in Latin America; Jonathan Morduch, an economist at Princeton University; and Gayle Ferraro, a documentary filmmaker who produced a film about several women who took out loans from the Grameen Bank. Mohammed Yunus, is the founder of the Grameen bank in Bangladesh.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen bank in Bangladesh
Maria Otero, President and CEO of Accion International, a micro-lending bank that works mostly with people in Latin America
Jonathan Morduch, an economist at Princeton University
and Gayle Ferraro, a documentary filmmaker who produced a film about several women who took out loans from the Grameen Bank.