Should be title "How I succeeded as banker to the poor"

books:


	• Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty Muhammad Yunus PublicAffairs, 2008 - 312 pages average customer review:based on 70 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Innovative, hopeful, and thought-provoking

There's no question that in most of the world, poor people are left out of the money cycle. Since the really poor don't have anything of value (the thinking goes), how can we trust them with anything? Why loan them money? How on earth would they pay? We'd be foolish to believe they would. Also, what would a person with no means actually do with a loan? They certainly don't need that kind of money.

Mohammad Yunus and his creation, the Grameen (Village) Bank, contradict this traditional banker thinking. This book gives a history of Professor Yunus himself and tells the story of how he came to create and grow the bank that eventually won a Nobel Prize for its microcredit programs aimed at exceptionally poor people, especially women. I found the early chapters, about Yunus' personal life growing up in eastern Pakistan, his time in the US, and his return to a newly formed Bangladesh interesting. They provide an appropriate background for his later work in the village near the university where he taught economics, beginning with the first loan he made himself - $27 to 42 people!

I found it quite an easy read, although it is outside my own field of expertise. I appreciated the pace up to the last couple of chapters, which seemed to come bowling at me with enormous speed (though maybe that's on purpose given the organization's seeming explosive growth in the 1990s and beyond). I would have been interested to also read about how a typical loan actually gets used and repaid - it's difficult for me to imagine what a borrower's balance sheet might look like that she would be able to put the full amount to work immediately and still be able to make a payment in 1 week. How much return would you really see on a goat or whatever in the first week? I just don't know. I also found myself questioning the seeming need for loan after loan after loan - I'm not convinced that this is completely a good thing, but it wasn't dealt with at much length in the book so I don't know how typical that is or what it really indicates. The last chapter, dealing with the future of the bank and Yunus' desire for a parallel economic system based not on profit but on social progress seemed a little weird to me, but I'm not an economist. It seems like more trouble to re-invent the wheel than to put the car we already have on another path.

One thing I found especially compelling is Yunus' development of specific measurable outcomes and goals for his bank's members. The bank's Decisions are interesting in that they seem to have been agreed on by the members themselves, not driven from above. I also appreciated his list of indicators to assess poverty level - although this was somewhat glossed over in the text, these measurable outcomes are applicable to any on-the-ground assessment of functional poverty or non-poverty. If this was the only thing in there, it would still be worthwhile. Read this book. Whether you agree wholeheartedly, scoff openly, or something in between, you'll find it thought provoking.

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Interesting read...

I have seen Dr. Yanus speak on the topic of Micro-Lending in person, at a consortium in Los Angeles. I was interested and inspired by both the man himself, as well as his ideas. I think that both he, and his workers at Grameen are deserving of the Nobel Prize for Peace. The book is told in his own words and the reader is exposed to both his humility as well as his fierce passion as an advocate for the poor. I found the book both readable and informative.

RS

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Excellent book about the origins of microcredit

I had wanted to read this book for awhile and when I finally got to it I was not disappointed. Yunus tells a captivating story that pulls the reader in. While the tone of the book is outspoken, Yunus can back up his tone with real results and a compelling vision for the future of social entrepreneurship and a world without extreme poverty.

He comes down pretty hard on well meaning but ineffective organizations and individuals that are out of touch with the poorest of the poor that he works with. Throughout the book, Yunus shows the depth of his trust in the poor to work for themselves and better their lives without charity.

Definitely a recommended read!

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Should be title "How I succeeded as banker to the poor"

There is no doubt that the author seems to have done a lot of hopeless people a great service. However, this book really struck me as being more about him, why he is so amazing, and how he repeatedly overcame odds dealing with short-sighted, ignorant, selfish bankers doing things the traditional way. The book would have appealed to me a lot more if he had gone further in explaining why traditional methods failed but were maintained. Also, there was very little frank discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of microfinance. Sounds like maybe I should have read the Wilson Quarterly article instead.

The book was a repetitive sales pitch and could have been a lot more.

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economic micro-lending = macro social leverage

Muhammad Yunus was born in 1940, the third of fourteen children, to an extremely devout Muslim family in Chittagong, the largest port city in Bangladesh. After studies at Chittagong University, and then University of Colorado and Vanderbilt (where he earned his PhD in economics), Yunus returned to help nation-build in Bangladesh, which had declared its independence from Pakistan in 1971. The independence movement had taken its toll; three million people were dead and 10 million were refugees. In 1974, a famine struck.

As he tried to alleviate the broad and deep poverty in his homeland, Yunus came to "dread" his economics lectures. They were tragically far removed from the everyday lives of normal people. In a theme that would characterize much of the rest of his life, Yunus almost completely abandoned classical book learning in favor of listening to and learning directly from the extreme poor -- the millions of Bangladeshis living off two cents a day. In 1976 he loaned $27 to 42 villagers, and thus was born what eventually became the Grameen Bank (grameen means rural). As of the publication of this revised autobiography in 2003, Grameen and its many replicants had made $3.8 billion of micro-loans to 2.4 million families in over 100 countries. The borrowers themselves own 93% of the bank equity, 95% of the loan recipients are women, and the repayment rate on the loans is 98%. For all that, in 2006 Yunus and Grameen won the Nobel Peace Prize (not to mention more than two dozen honorary doctorates).

Yunus is an excellent writer and story-teller. He shares at length about the many criticisms, myths, and prejudices he's had to face, especially from the "obtuse ineptitude" of governments and the sclerotic bureaucracy of aid organizations (he's particularly critical of the World Bank). He has tremendous faith in the initiative, skill, resilience and creativity of the poor. They're the ultimate entrepreneurs. "Not one single Grameen borrower requires any special training" (205), or any collateral, for that matter. Conversely, Yunus also believes that the poor have many things to teach the rich. When the World Bank's president Barber Conable bragged to Yunus about hiring the best minds in the world, he responded that "hiring smart economists does not necessarily translate into policies and programs that help the poor." Spurning conventional wisdom about development aid and economic categories of the liberal left and the free market right, Grameen's success speaks for itself. As a follow up, see Yunus's newest book called Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2008).

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Muhammad Yunus is that rare thing: a bona fide visionary. His dream is the total eradication of poverty from the world. In 1983, against the advice of banking and government officials, Yunus established Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh with minuscule loans. Grameen Bank, based on the belief that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a fortunate few, now provides over 2.5 billion dollars of micro-loans to more than two million families in rural Bangladesh. Ninety-four percent of Yunus's clients are women, and repayment rates are near 100 percent. Around the world, micro-lending programs inspired by Grameen are blossoming, with more than three hundred programs established in the United States alone.

Banker to the Poor is Muhammad Yunus's memoir of how he decided to change his life in order to help the world's poor. In it he traces the intellectual and spiritual journey that led him to fundamentally rethink the economic relationship between rich and poor, and the challenges he and his colleagues faced in founding Grameen. He also provides wise, hopeful guidance for anyone who would like to join him in "putting homelessness and destitution in a museum 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." The definitive history of micro-credit direct from the man that conceived of it, Banker to the Poor is necessary and inspirational reading for anyone interested in economics, public policy, philanthropy, social history, and business.

Muhammad Yunus was born in Bangladesh and earned his Ph.D. in economics in the United States at Vanderbilt University, where he was deeply influenced by the civil rights movement. He still lives in Bangladesh, and travels widely around the world on behalf of Grameen Bank and the concept of micro-credit.

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