Muhammad Yunus, Bangladeshi founder of the micro-credit lending institution the Grameen Bank. Inspired to lift those in extreme poverty out of it by providing the capital for entrepreneurship and thus self-sustainability.
Here are some quotes and perspectives from the autobiography that I'd like to keep hold of.
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Talking about the impact of the loan on a woman who receives it and runs a successful business on the loan:
"When the first-time borrower pays back her first installment, there is enormous excitement because she has proved to herself she can earn the money to pay it. Then the second installment, then the third. It is an exciting experience for her. It is the excitement of discovering the worth of her own ability, and this excitement seizes her; it is palpable and contagious to anyone who meets her or talks to her. She discovers that she is more than what everybody said she was. She has something inside of her that she never knew she had.
The Grameen loan is not simply cash, it becomes a kind of ticket to self-discovery and self-exploration. The borrower begins to explore her potential, to discover the creativity she has inside her."
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"The borrowers of commerical banks are all living well above the poverty line. Our borrowers are all initially below the poverty line. We would like our borrowers to rise above the poverty line. Grameen has decided that, in our national context at least, rising above the poverty line in rural Bangladesh means meeting the following criteria:
-the household must have a rain-proof house, a sanitary toilet, clean drinking water, the ability to repay 300 taka ($8) a week
-all school-age children must be in school
-the entire household must eat three meals a day and must have medical checkups"
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"...Grameen is only trying to liberate people from the tyranny of poverty and the injustice of a life without hope."
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"...Credit is not simply an income-generating tool, it is a powerful weapon for social change, a way to give people new meaning in their lives."
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"Poverty is not created by the poor, it is created by the structures of society, and policies pursued by society. Change the structure as we are doing in Bangladesh, and you will see the poor change their lives."
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"Somehow we have persuaded ourselves that capitalist economy must be fuelled only by greed. This has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Only the profit-maximisers get to play in the market-place and try their luck. People who are not excited about profit-aking stay way from it, condemn it and keep searching for alternatives.
We can condemn the private sector for all its mistakes, but we cannot justify why we ourselves are not trying to change things, not trying to make things better by participating in it. The private sector, unlike the government, is open to everyone, even to those who are not interested in making profit.
The challenge I set before anyone who condemns private-sector business is this: if you are a socially conscious person, why don't you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?"
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"I am proposing that we replace the narrow profit maximisation principle with a generalised principle - an entrepreneur who maximises a bundle consisting of two components: a) profit and b) social returns, subject to the condition that profit cannot be negative."
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"To me changing the quality of life of the bottom 50 per cent of the population is the essence of development. To be more rigorous, I would efine developmetn by focusing on the quality of life of the lower 25 per cent of the population."
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"Of course, investing in roads ,motorways, power plants, airports turns on the engine in the forward first-class carriages, those are the fanciest and richest ones, and it enhances the train's engine capacity by many fold; but whether it can help ignite or enhance the capacity of the engines in subsequent carriages, in all other layers and strata of society (also called 'the trickle-down effect'), remains uncertain."
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"...I firmly believe that all human beings have an innate skill. I call it the survival skill. The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability. They do not need us to tech them how to survive, they already know this. So rather than waste our time teaching them new skills, we decided to make maximum use of their existing skills. Giving the poor access to credit allows them to immediately to put into practice the skills they already know - to weave, husk rice paddy, raise cows, peddle a rickshaw. And the cash they earn is then a tool, a key that unlocks a host of other abilities, a key to explore one's own potential."
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"Government decision-makers, many NGOs and international consultants start the poverty alleviation work by launching a very elaborate training programme. This may be explained in three ways: first they start with the assumption that people are poor because they lack skills. If they can acquire a skill, they will, of course, no longer remain poor. Second, they start with training because this perpetuates their own interests - more jobs with a big budget for themselves without the responsibility of having to produce any concrete results. You can show you are doing a great deal without really doing anything. Third, they don't know what else can be done.
A huge industry has evolved worldwide, thanks to aid-flow and welfare budgets, for the sole purpose of providing training. Experts on poverty alleviation keep on insisting that training is absolutely vital for the poor t move up the economic ladder. They claim this is a prerequisite.
But if you go out into the real world you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained, or illiterate, they are poor because they cannot retain the returns of their labour. The reason for this is obvious - they have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital which calls the tune. Profit is unashamedly biased towards capital. The poor work for the benefit of someone who controls the productive assets.
Why can't the poor control any capital? Because they do not inherit any capital or credit, nor does anybody give them access to capital, because we have been made to believe that the poor are not to be trusted with credit - they are not creditworthy. But are banks people-worthy?"
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"...the micro-credit movement which is built around and for and with money, ironically, at is at its heart, at its deepest root, not about money at all. It is about helping each person achieve his or her fullest potential. It is not about cash capital, but about human capital. Money is merely a tool that helps unlock human dreams and helps even the poorest and most unfortunate people on this planet achieve dignity, respect, and meaning in their lives."
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"Charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about those of other people. Our conscious is adequately appeased by charity.
But the real issue is creating a level playing-field for everybody, giving every human being a fair and equal chance."
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