from the Toronto Star Need can happen here, Nobel Prize-winning microcredit messiah tells business peopleJun 10, 2008 04:30 AMRita TrichurBusiness ReporterMuhammad Yunus doesn't talk like a typical banker. He believes that access to credit is a fundamental human right.Nicknamed Bangladesh's "banker to the poor" for motivating a global microfinance movement, the Nobel Prize-winning economist told a Toronto business audience yesterday the financial system shuts out nearly two-thirds of the world's population, denying the poor both opportunity and dignity.Poverty is often perceived as a dilemma of the developing world, Yunus said, but the problem is alive and well in North America."You'll be surprised how many people in Toronto do not qualify to do business with the banks," he said in a...
from ReutersBy Aasa Christine StoltzOSLO - The Norwegian government, companies and a private investor have formed a $117 million microcredit fund aiming to help people in poor countries out of poverty, although critics have said its interest rates will be too high.It will be one of the world's biggest funds in the field of microfinance which involves lending small sums of cash to poor entrepreneurs who would otherwise not have access to traditional banking or credit facilities.Privately owned financial group and initiator Ferd has joined with banking group DnB NOR, insurance company Storebrand, life insurer KLP and the government to set up the 600 million Norwegian crowns ($117.1 million) fund.The state will contribute 50 percent of the fund, and the other partners the rest, the foreign...
from Surrey NowTed ColleySurrey NowTuesday, May 20, 2008Surrey's Kamila Romanowski has made a major commitment to microcredit.On May 31, the third-year SFU student will join 26 others on a 3,000-kilometre bike ride from Vancouver to Tijuana, Mexico to raise money for micro-loans to poverty-stricken people in other lands.Thirty seconds into a phone interview, it became very evident Romanowski is at the very least, a bubbly personality. Or as she put it, "an eternal optimist.""When you look at a map, Canada is on the top and Mexico is on the bottom, so technically, it's all downhill," she said with a laugh.Romanowski said she was planning a bike trip to Mexico anyway when she came across the website of Global Agents For Change, a Vancouver-based non-profit dedicated to using microcredit to...
from The Sydney Morning Herald Connie LevettIN GHANA, there is a running joke that they are all becoming Italians - they can't afford rice anymore and are eating processed pasta from Italy. These are not the poorest of the poor, these are working urban Ghanaians, according to Amrote Abdella, who runs projects to break the hunger cycle in Africa.In Ethiopia, the price of wheat has trebled in the past year. Across the developing world, the global food crisis is biting higher and higher up the economic food chain as grain prices are driven up by a trifecta of climate change, growing demand for animal fodder and the use of grains for biofuels.Rural Africans living on less than a dollar a day can do nothing to influence these factors, but there are ways to escape the poverty and chronic...
from AFP via GoogleWASHINGTON (AFP) — The World Bank and British-based bank Standard Chartered said Thursday that they had teamed up to expand the microfinance, or tiny loans, to impoverished borrowers in Africa and Asia.Standard Chartered, a commercial bank, is already dabbling in microfinance, but the new initiative with the Washington-based World Bank will enable it to boost its existing programs."This transaction will unlock more funding for microfinance. We believe improving access to finance is a key lever in reducing poverty and catalyzing broader social and economic development," said Standard Chartered chief executive Peter Sands.Few people had heard of microcredit before a determined Bangladeshi economist called Muhammad Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, and put the...
from News Post IndiaLatin American banks and financial experts have converged here to explore ways to reach out to the poor through micro credit and other initiatives, EFE new agency reported Sunday.The annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) April 4-8 will discuss ways to eradicate poverty in Latin America and in the Caribbean, the report said.The American banks are transforming their traditional ways of doing business and looking to provide the poorest members of the society access to financial system through micro credit and other innovative initiatives, it said.The banks have already launched a series of schemes such as creating departments of innovation and development, consultation services and low-interest credit facility for the poor to take up self-employment...
from Merinews Saidul Khan,Where there is a will, there is a way. And the women of Meghalaya have just proved that. In a story of motivation and inspiration, they have formed a rural banking system that has made it easier for villagers to avail loan.WOMEN IN Meghalaya have formed the first of its kind bank in Meghalaya, a rural banking system based on the concept of micro-credit system. It is the North East Region Institute for Micro credit (NIM)-Banking Institution and Learning Centre of Excellence for Holistic Aspiration of Mothers (BILCHAM), an apex self help group (SHG) federation. Though this bank started in October 2006 in Garo hills, the system got underway with the formation of woman SHGs in the model villages of West Garo Hills Community Resource Management Society (WGHCRMS). The...
from Russia TodayMoscow city government has teamed up with a major bank to create a company specializing in microcredit – a method for giving small businesses start-up loans. The President of VTB 24 Bank, Mikhail Zadornov, said the new company, called Microfinace, was looking forward to helping developing firms.Small and medium-sized firms are key to diversifying the economy away from the oil and gas sector, according to the government.Zadornov added that in the future he may add new categories of loans for citizens ranging from servicemen to young people.In 2008, VTB 24 is planning to allocate around 60 million dollars for micro-loans.Earlier this month, Zadornov met Professor Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who pioneered microfinancing. He gave his backing to the...
from Russia TodayFor three decades, Bangladeshi economist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has been using micro-loans as a weapon to fight poverty. With loans as small as $US 10, he helped millions to launch small businesses. Now he is in Moscow to share his ideas on using micro-credit.At his Moscow presentation on Thursday, Yunus said the need for micro-financing in Russia is huge.Mikhail Mamuta, the head of Russia’s micro-financing centre, agrees. He says Russia needs no less than $US 10 million for micro-credit.Most banks won’t loan money unless the borrower has both a credit history and a guarantor. The Bangladeshi economist believes the financial sector should not view micro-credits for small businesses as charity work.“Anyone can be brought within the framework of...
from Bates MagazineMicroVest’s Gil Crawford ’80 takes the lead as private investors surge into the microfinance worldBy H. Jay BurnsGil Crawford ’80 could handle the heat and dust. It was the inequality of the situation that ripped at his spirit.It was 1986, and Crawford was a volunteer helping to run a Red Cross famine-relief operation Chad. After the yellow and white relief trucks rolled into a nomadic camp and the hungry people gathered around, Crawford and his team would begin dropping 100-pound bags of grain on the baked ground.In return, a tribesman might offer a goat. “I’d accept it, to put a modicum of dignity into the relationship,” Crawford recalls. Otherwise, the relationship “was grotesquely undignified. And it was a grotesquely inefficient way of solving a...
from the Guardian By Krittivas MukherjeeSUNNA, India, Savita Jiddewar is a rare success story on the cotton fields of central India, the epicentre of an agrarian crisis that has seen 150,000 farmers commit suicide since 1997 because they could not pay back loans.Her home stands out strikingly in this small village of dirt lanes and pale blue brick houses. She has a television set, a DVD player and a comfortable sofa. A mobile phone rings intermittently and the aroma of cooking wafts from the kitchen.Clearly, she is well off in a farming village where most people struggle to make ends meet and where at least four people have killed themselves unable to repay crop loans.While her neighbours borrowed heavily, entangling themselves in a never-ending cycle of debts, Jiddewar, a widow whose...
from All AfricaLeadership (Abuja)NEWS31 March 2008Posted to the web 31 March 2008By Amaka IfeakanduAbujaIn furtherance of effort to ensure steady flow of funds in the Small and Medium scale Enterprises (SMEs), particularly micro enterprises, the Bankers' Committee is set to establish micro credit fund (MCF) of N20 billion.A guideline released by the Development Finance Department of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said that the fund is projected to grow to N100 billion by the year 2010.In addition to this, it said banks are expected to continue to support SMEs while the CBN, in collaboration with the fiscal authorities would work out other necessary incentives to make SME lending more attractive to banks.The major objective of the MCF according to the guideline was to complement the...
from EkklesiaBy Patrick HynesThe much publicised “credit crunch” refers to the way loans and other forms of credit are becoming difficult or more expensive to obtain. This crisis may bring harder times for us all, individuals and businesses alike. But access to credit has always been a daily problem for people who are poor, as they are often denied fair finance due to a lack of collateral. The notion of collateral, where property is used to secure a loan, ensures the poor will always be poor.With no collateral there is no chance of a loan, the means to self-employment and therefore to own something as basic as a shelter. Someone needs simply to break through this vicious cycle of poverty, and thus enable people to earn a dignified living for themselves and their families.Early...
from the Daily Princetonian By Jack AckermanThough charity organizations may inundate the University’s listing of student groups, Ankit Bhatia ’10 and Becky Harper ’10 have taken their desire to help the less fortunate to the next level.The two have created a group that they said they hope will increase student awareness of microfinance, an economic strategy developed by economist Muhammad Yunus in which groups provide loans to citizens of developing counties hoping to jumpstart failing economies. Yunus was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for the application of microfinance in Bangledesh. Bhatia explained that the group hopes to act as a microlender itself in the future. As of now, however, the group’s goal is to raise awareness of microfinance without providing its own loans...
from the Korea Times By Ali Hamid KhanProfessor Yunus and his Grameen Bank, of which he is the founder and managing director, have given a tremendous boost to the image of Bangladesh and also given the world a new vision, a new concept to tackle the most formidable and destructive problem nagging Bangladesh and most parts of the world; deep-rooted and pervasive poverty gnawing away at the world's economic and social stability and harmony.The project started in Jobra (a village adjacent to Chittagong University) and neighboring villages from 1976 to 1979. With the central bank's sponsorship and support of the nationalized commercial banks, Tangail district (a district north of Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh) was brought under this project in 1979.The bank's positive impact on its...
from the Huffington PostDennis Whittle A recent article by James Suroweicki in the New Yorker argues that micro-finance has become over-hyped. Suroweicki concludes that micro-finance is not the binding constraint because it does not create new jobs. Instead, developing countries need more small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs), which are the source of most job creation in the developed economy. So we should focus on SMEs instead.After working in the international development field for over twenty years, I can tell you I have heard this argument many, many times before. Not the specific content of the argument, mind you, but the structure of the argument.When I began my first job at USAID in Manila in 1984, SMEs were a big part of the aid program, and John, the head of the SME...
from the Grameen BankAfter Success in Poor Nations, Grameen Bank Tries New YorkBy Robin ShulmanWashington Post Staff WriterNEW YORK -- "Señoras!" calls the banker, summoning her borrowers to attention at their first loan-repayment meeting.The small-business borrowers -- day-care providers, clothing sellers, jewelry makers -- crowd into the living room where their children are napping, eating cereal and watching TV.They are part of a nascent lending program created by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for developing the Grameen Bank, which uses micro-loans to help eradicate poverty in developing nations.But these women are not in Bangladesh, they are in Queens. They are among the first 100 borrowers of Grameen America, which began disbursing loans...
from The ChronicleBy BLAISE SALMON and ALEC SOUCYThere is one important RRSP investment option you should know about. Instead of using your investments to only generate money for your "golden years," it could also simultaneously help families in the developing world climb out of poverty.A few Canadian financial institutions have created microcredit investment programs that are safe for investors, RRSP-eligible, fully guaranteed and pay a reasonable interest rate. Microcredit has helped millions of families living on less than a dollar a day to care for themselves and their children.The world’s most famous example of microfinance, the Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. The Bangladeshi bank now employs 16,000 people and has more than seven...
from The New Yorker by James Surowiecki Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have an economic innovation that has become not just popular but downright chic. The innovation—microfinance—involves making small loans to poor entrepreneurs, usually in developing countries. It has been around since the nineteen-seventies, but in the past few years it has seized the imaginations of economists, activists, and bankers alike. The U.N. declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit, and the microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, while celebrities like Natalie Portman and companies like Benetton have become fervent microloan advocates. Even ordinary Americans can now...
from Southern Maryland OnlineAuthor of The Poor Always Pay Back Tells Scot Audience that Most Frequent Loan by Nobel Prize-Winning Micro-bank Was for Milk Cows ST. MARY'S CITY, Md., St. Mary's College Professor of Economics Asif Dowla traveled to Scotland recently to teach his "First World" audience a lesson in banking from an unexpected source-the developing world. His subject is one that is gaining support in global efforts to empower the world's poor-microcredit.Dowla presented the keynote address at the "Banking the Un-banked" Conference in Glasgow. The conference was organized by the Scottish Poverty Information Unit of Glasgow's Caledonian University and the Financial Service Agency, the main regulator of the financial industry in the United Kingdom.While there, Dowla was...
from SifyManreet Sodhi Someshwar / DNA MONEYGrameen Bank, the pioneer of microcredit, has entered the US market at a time when the subprime crisis has the American economy reeling. Its first loans have been in the city of New York. A third-world bank lending to citizens of the world’s richest country - ironical yet illuminating. In the face of declining credibility of mainstream US banks hit by the mortgage meltdown, the Bangladeshi bank has stepped in to finance those on the fringe of the banking system. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen bank, has been honoured with a Nobel prize and hailed as “Banker to the Poor”. Will the microcredit techniques of Grameen Bank work in the US where subprime has fizzled out?Both microcredit and subprime credit work on the fundamental principle...
from the Financial TimesBy Delphine Strauss in LondonMicrofinance institutions urgently need to improve management and corporate governance to cope with growing competition and a flood of capital that threatens to erode lending standards, a think-tank warns in a report published on Monday.Born of philanthropy, microfinance – making tiny loans to the very poor – has come into vogue among commercial banks and international investors, inspired in part by the Nobel prize-winning Muhammad Yunus, founder of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank. The sector is growing quickly. The number of lenders is rising by 25 per cent a year, and the stock of foreign capital investment trebled to $4bn (€2.6bn, £2bn) from 2004 to 2006, according to the survey by the Centre for the Study of Financial...
from the Mail & Guardian OnlineThe figures tell their own extraordinary story. In 1974 an economics lecturer at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh, lent $27 to a group of impoverished villagers. He went on to set up Grameen Bank to ensure that the poor had access to loans and, over the next 34 years, it disbursed $6,6-billion in millions of tiny loans to those living in poverty. Last year there were 7,4-million borrowers, 98% of whom were women. Most of the lending is for income-generating activities -- small street vending, farming. In 1984, Grameen began giving small loans to build and repair homes; a total of 649 714 have now been built. The bank offers student loans -- 20 000 last year for higher education -- and provides 50 000 scholarships for schooling.There are few people...
from Canada dot ComMicrocredit concept offers hope for world's poorest people Blaise SalmonTimes ColonistAs the blizzard of RRSP hype reaches a crescendo this week, there is one important RRSP investment option you should know about. Canadian RRSPs can help families in the developing world climb out of poverty. A few Canadian financial institutions have created microcredit investment programs that are safe for investors, RRSP-eligible, fully guaranteed and pay a reasonable interest rate.Investing your RRSP funds in this way helps to make a significant impact on global poverty. Typically, each $1,000 invested for a year creates five jobs for people in poor villages around the world.Microcredit programs in the developing world fund a huge variety of small businesses -- from raising...
from EkklesiaBy staff writersHarnessing the power of the market to help solve the problems of global poverty, hunger and inequality is both possible and necessary, a Nobel Peace Prize winner told an invited audience of specialists in London on Thursday night.Professor Muhammad Yunus is doing what some have regarded as squaring the circle through microfinance: the innovative social banking programme that provides people who are poor, mainly women, with small loans which they use to launch businesses and lift their families out of poverty.Patrick Hynes from Oikocredit, which is seeking new investors in Britain, was at the event, one of the Professor Yunus’s recent series of talks to promote his new book.At this meeting of the Microfinance Club UK, Yunus outlined his vision of Social...
from FrontlineR. KRISHNAKUMARThe Congress’ microfinance organisation is seen as having been designed to scuttle the State government’s Kudumbashree project. Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram inaugurating the Janasree Mission in Kochi on February 2. Others from left are Congress leaders Oommen Chandy, M.M. Hassan, K.V. Thomas and Ramesh Chennithala.STRANGE as it may seem, the Congress is venturing into the world of microfinance, of all places, in Kerala, a State where a successful microfinance-linked poverty alleviation programme under the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government has already been attracting attention as a development initiative worthy of emulation.The State government programme Kudumbashree is set to enter its tenth year soon. It has been running through a network of...
from Business Day Africa Written by Geoffrey Irungu and Beatrice Gachenge A Washington-based firm has come to the rescue of small traders as it emerged that micro finance institutions (MFIs) are in the process of formulating a rescue plan for the traders affected by political violence.MFIs revealed yesterday they may have lost between Sh3.75 billion and Sh10 billion, or 15 to 40 per cent of the value of the loans repayments put at Sh25 billion which have become doubtful.Micro-Credit Summit (MCS), a US organisation, wrote a letter as early as January 4, this year, asking for donations around the world to help the Kenyan MFIs to ride through the crisis by appealing for funds from others. However, it was not yet clear how much it had raised for the purpose since then.MCS is a programme...
from Gorkhapatra By A Staff ReporterKathmandu, Jan. 2: Menuka Khatiwada, a resident of Mulpani VDC-4 of Kathmandu district wakes up early in the morning and utilises her time in milking cows. She now is the owner of five cows. Khatiwada says that she sells 25 litres of milk daily at Rs.10 to 15 per litre and generates a handsome income.She said that she and her husband were able to keep a family of seven solely by selling milk. Her four children study at the private boarding school. �Three years before I was idle and my precious time was going waste, but now I have got the meaning and value of myself apart from being engaged in serving the household I found myself a complete independent woman," she added.She further said that Centre for Self-help Development (CSD) a national level...
from The New NationCyclone Sidr victims who lost almost everything to the disaster that befell them are now facing pressure from Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) for repayment of micro-credit repayment installments. The pressure is so intense that some of the credit recipients are selling out the relief materials they have received from different sources to meet the demands, or are hiding themselves from NGO supervisors to escape harassment.Such a pressure for loan recovery by the NGOs including the large ones like BRAC, ASA and even the semi-government Grameen Bank has shocked the conscious section of the people. How those families which have lost almost everything to the cyclone and are just maintaining their existence in extreme hardships can be expected to repay their loan...
from E WeekBy Renee Boucher FergusonBusiness intelligence expands Opportunity International's ability to help people climb out of poverty.In 1998, Dorothy Njobvu Kanjautso, a 35-year-old mother of three from the village of Lilongwe in Malawi, Africa, found herself widowed when her husband died of AIDS. She had no job and few prospects. But she had a dream.That dream came true with the loan of $133 from Opportunity International. Njobvu Kanjautso used the money to open the Ketava Nursery and Primary School, which provides education to poor children from her village. The school flourished and, with additional loans, Njobvu Kanjautso was able to hire eight teachers. Ketava now has four classrooms and 250 students. As a result of her achievement, Njobvu Kanjautso is able to care for her...