Yunus, Muhammad with Alan Jolis, Banker to the Poor, The Story of Grameen Bank, Aurum Press Ltd, London, 1998, ISBN 978-1-85410-924-8, pp 313, Price: UK Pounds 8.99. It is the firm conviction of Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, that poverty can be eradicated and put away in museums once and for all. As the author puts it, the bottom line of his belief system is that 'poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums'. This is what motivated this stalwart to establish the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the pioneer in the field of micro-finance for the poor. Today, Grameen Bank can boast that it provides 2.5 billion dollars of micro-loans to over two million rural poor in the country. The book is essentially the memoirs of Yunus charting the obstacles along the way, and with the sheer will and perseverance of the founder and his staff, resulted in it becoming a success story. Yunus started out as an ordinary university professor, when the idea struck him that people were poor because the financial system which could help them simply did not exist in Bangladesh. To this end, he carried out lengthy `battles' with the World Bank and local banks in his own country, to try and sell them the idea of microcredit loans for the less privileged. Some of his efforts reaped good harvests, but more often than not they proved exercises in futility. In discussing his interaction with the World Bank, he provides startling insights into the workings of multilateral aid agencies, for instance, in how aid projects in the developing world give rise to enormous bureaucracies that are corrupt and inefficient and end up incurring significant losses. As he states, if aid is sent to a country such as Bangladesh, it is invariably used to build roads and bridges and such like, which the government claims will help the poor in the `long run'. But, continues Yunus, in the long run we are all dead and nothing trickles down to the poor. The author firmly believes that development aid should aim at directly eradicating poverty, and that development should be regarded as a human rights issue and not one of merely GNP growth. The idea behind all aid is the `bigger the better', with scant regard for the quality of the assistance. While working with the poor over the years, the author dispels many myths and cliches about the poor, such as that the poor are not creditworthy, that they cannot save, that the poor need to be trained before they can undertake any income-generating activity, and that poor women have no skills and so it is futile to talk about programs for them. From his first-hand experience, he also provides several hard-hitting home truths about the actual predicament of the poor. Grameen believes in reaching out to women borrowers rather than males as it was felt that credit given to women worked faster than credit given to their male counterparts. Yunus then devotes a chapter to the problems encountered in setting up the bank and extending loans, especially to poor women. He discusses the social stigma attached to women receiving loans and the resistance they met with in lending to destitute women. The author tells the tale of many a woman borrower whose life was doomed till the day she received a micro-loan, which proved a window of opportunity for improving her plight. What then is the actual repayment mechanism of micro finance that Grameen employs? …
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Sep 1, 2013
Ibtissem Baklouti 
Open Access