Sitting in my apartment in sunny Denver, CO, I'm thinking of Bangladesh, a country with the population density equivalent to half the US population in an area the size of Wisconsin without clean water or clean toilets. Disease, infant mortality and despair run rampant across the countryside.
My question to America is "Do you care?" or, more importantly, "Would you be more likely to care if you knew you would be able to make a difference that you could see and measure?"
Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the father of micro-lending, may have already given us the answer to the latter. In his two NY Times bestselling books Banker to the Poor and Creating a World Without Poverty, he outlines what it looks like to have a system where capital is A) recycled, and B) put directly in the hands of the people who can use it to generate business. His argument (with 30 years of success to back it up) is that the poorest of the poor have some skill that they've used to survive, and their need isn't for training, it's for capital and a market.
People have with in them the will to survive. But more than that, they have the will to dream big, to the will to change their circumstances and the will to change their family trees, one branch at a time.
So how does this work?
A micro-loan, at least in this context, is a loan of as little as $25 that is given to a person who belongs to a community of borrowers, without collateral, that they agree to repay on a fixed schedule with interest. It's different from charity in several significant ways.
1) These are loans, not gifts. They're on a fixed schedule, including interest. Once the borrower has repaid, both borrower and lender may enter other deals with each other or other borrowers/lenders.
2) These are loans to generate income producing businesses. Whatever the borrower's skill, whether making baskets to sell or anything else, must produce income. The goal is for every borrower to become financially self-sustaining, and possibly even a lender some day. There are no loans for simple consumption.
3) The target borrower for these loans are women, to empower them and eventually their children/families.
For thirty years, he's taken the concept of micro-lending across the countryside of his native land. He's helped his fellow countrymen help themselves, and lowered the poverty rate from a mind-numbing 62% to under 25%. While their current state is still roughly the same as the Great Depression, the progress is phenomenal.
His argument seems to eliminate the obstacle all charitable organizations face - how do you finish the mission before you run out of money? By making the structure a loan that gets repaid, people can willingly invest significantly larger sums and, with the promise of their money back (Yunus boasts a 98% repayment rate among the poor), the capital can be redeployed again and again. Further, it instills in the organization the need to function with business efficiency to become self-sustaining and to eliminate the need for continuous fundraising.
By reaching out through a person-to-person network, establishing local accountability and a systematic way to empower people, we have the ability to end poverty in this lifetime.
Are you in, America?
