1.For many people, there seems to be no escape from poverty; in other words, they are poor, and they have no hope that this will ever change. In addition, they have the social problems of poverty—among them, low social status, violence, poor health, and lack of education.
2. Imagine this situation: a poor woman has an idea for a small business to lift herself and her family out of poverty. She needs a little money to begin this business. She goes to a bank to borrow the money, and the banker interviews her. At this bank, as at most banks, the borrower must meet three necessary conditions: character, capacity, and collateral. That is, if this woman wants to borrow money from the bank, she must show that she (1) is honest (has character), (2) is able to run her business (has capacity), and (3) owns a house, land, or something valuable (has collateral) for the bank to take if she can’t pay back the money. So what happens to the woman? The bank won’t lend her the money because she doesn’t have any collateral. In such a situation, there seems to be no way for the woman to break the cycle of poverty and the problems that are associated with it.
3. One possible solution these days is microlending. This is a system of special banks and programs that are loaning money to “the poorest of the poor.” The idea began in Bangladesh, with a man named Mohammad Yunus, who founded Grameen Bank. The bank lends small amounts of money to people who want to go into business. These are people who could never receive a loan from a “regular” bank. To receive a loan through Grameen Bank, people still must have character and capacity, but collateral
is not necessary any longer. There is a different requirement: each borrower must join a “borrowing group.” This small group meets regularly, follows a list of rules from the bank, and offers advice and support to members. Instead of collateral, there is peer pressure; i.e., group members make sure that each person pays back his or her loan. They want to keep their “good name” and continue doing business with the bank.
4.Grameen Bank has had many successes and only a few failures. In a developing country such as Bangladesh, a person can buy a cow or a sewing machine and begin a small business with only $20 to $50. Today, there are 8.35 million borrowers in 81,379 villages in Bangladesh. The bank makes over $123 million in loans in a typical month, and the repayment rate is
an amazing 96.67 percent. At first, the bank lent half of the money to men and half to women. Unfortunately, most of the Bangladeshi men spent the money on themselves, not the business. Now, 96 percent of the borrowers
are women. In Bangladesh—and other countries that started similar microlending programs—the bankers soon learned that urban programs were not as successful as rural ones. Borrowers in cities did not always repay the loans. Because of the importance of peer pressure, microlending is more effective in small villages, where everyone knows and depends on everyone else, than in urban areas (where it’s possible to be anonymous—unknown).
5.The primary goal of this and other similar programs is the eradication of poverty. However, as poverty has decreased, there have been some surprising secondary effects of microlending programs. Perhaps the main subsidiary effect has been a change in the social status of women. Traditionally, in some societies, people thought of women as worthless. But when a women has access to money and is able to demonstrate her capacity for business, she often receives more respect than before from the male members of her family and from the entire village.