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Ever been stabbed in the back by your best friend? Send your tale to Drama Queen for a Day.

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T A B L E++T A L K

Parents discuss the struggle to balance child and career in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Time for 1 Thing
By Beth Wolfensberger Singer
The jigsaw puzzle as marital aid
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Why I miss those loathsome "Barney" kids
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Unlike our own children, we could turn them off when they got really obnoxious
(02/10/98)

Chewing fat with the girls
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The Duchess of Pork and the Dershowitz of Dieting serve up this season's most fascinating diet books
(02/09/98)

Bitter Fame
By Jay Parini
"Birthday Letters" is a huge gift to readers that has cost Ted Hughes dearly
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The good father
By Kate Moses
Now it's clear why Ted Hughes has been silent all these years: To protect his children
(02/06/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

BANKING ON POOR WOMEN | PAGE 2 OF 2

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The first loans Yunis ever made were out of his pocket -- $27 a piece to 42 people. He had become convinced that people were poor not just because they had no financial resources but also because they had no social currency. Yunis, then in his 30s, made it his life's work to change both the plight and the perception of the poor. "When you see that you can touch the life of one person and it happens right in front of your own eyes, it's a very intoxicating experience," he says. "What excites me is the possibility that this can happen to millions and billions of people around the world."

Yunis convinced the Bangladeshi government to allow him to start a bank, which has since grown to become the country's largest rural credit institution, operating in almost 40,000 villages across Bangladesh. Since its founding, the bank has loaned out almost $2 million to a mostly female clientele (94 percent of the bank's total borrowers). The 57-year-old Yunis targets women because he believes they are the key to improving the lives of children. They tend to funnel more money, he says, back into the family than men do, and tend to invest in tomorrow while men spend their money as soon as they get it.

Yunis, himself a father of two, believes that his work at Grameen is more about people than dollars and cents. It's about helping the poor release themselves from poverty's grip; it's about remedying the problem, not donating money in the name of charity and then walking away. "Charity doesn't help poor people, it takes away their dignity; it takes away their initiative," Yunis says. "So I think when a person has a business kind of arrangement, a partnership, he or she feels equal. Charity helps remove concern about the poor because people feel that they have done their duty just by throwing a few crumbs at them." Yunis believes he's promoting more of a philosophy of living than an economic model. His 16 somewhat controversial commandments for Grameen borrowers are embodiments of that philosophy -- thou shall grow vegetables year 'round, thou shall exercise, thou shall not exchange dowries, thou shall keep thy families small. "Why does a family need so many children? To help you in your old age?" Yunis asks. "Have less children and build them up so they become economically sound people. It's better to go for quality than quantity."

By promoting his philosophy and loaning small amounts of money -- averaging the equivalent of $100 at a time -- to women wanting to start or expand a business, Yunis has started a revolution in the banking world. That revolution is called "microcredit," a principle of promoting money-lending at commercial interest rates to the world's poorest. Hundreds of institutions from Bolivia to Kenya have now modeled themselves on the principle of microcredit. Moreover, what Yunis discovered -- and what the rest of the world is finding out -- is that the poor are not financial risks: 98 percent of Grameen's borrowers repay their loans.

"What started out as a social and geo movement is now moving into the mainstream of the private sector," says Joyita Mukherjee, microfinance specialist at the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest at the World Bank. "Commercial banks are now looking at these individuals as a market niche. And that's good." The microcredit movement has grown so much that last year there was a Microcredit Summit in Washington, D.C., that kicked off a global campaign to try to bring credit to the poorest people, with a goal of reaching 100 million lives by the year 2005. The summit brought together more than 2,900 participants, from Hillary Rodham Clinton to the president of the Women's Environment & Development Organization, all in the name of spreading Yunis' microcredit principle.

Mukherjee observes that the movement is not just changing women's economic status -- it is also changing their traditional social status as well. "You see a big difference in the lives of these women and what they are able to do. You can take a view and say this is only financial services but it actually affects more than just the economic activity. It's also about empowerment and changing women's roles in society."

Since Begum took out her loan and became an important entrepreneur in her village, she has seen other women begin to walk around and leave their traditional places -- a significant shift in rural Bangladesh, where women are expected to stay literally inside their homes. And within her own family, the roles have definitely changed: She is the breadwinner and outearns her husband by 30 to 40 percent. This Bangladeshi woman now not only leaves her hut everyday but also, through a cell phone and a cow, has made herself a place in the world -- all, she says, because of that man she sees visiting her village every once and a while.
SALON | Feb. 12, 1998