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MEMORIAL LECTURE

Poverty, an artificial imposition: Yunus

Star Business Desk
Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus yesterday delivered the second Annual Memorial Parliamentary Lecture in honour of an academician and parliamentarian, Prof Hirendranath Mukherjee, at a joint meeting of the members of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha of India. Prof Hiren Mukherjee has been one of the 20th century's best examples of the intellectual prowess in South Asia. "If our human resources are nurtured and simply given a chance to grow, I am certain we can all change our economic and social situations dramatically," Yunus says. Here is the abridged text of the Nobel laureate's lecture.
In 1974, I found it extremely difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the classroom while a terrible famine was ragingoutside. Suddenly I felt the emptiness of economic theories in the face of crushing hunger and poverty. I realized that 1 had to leave the campus and somehow make myself useful to the distressed people of Jobra, the neighbouring village.
In trying to discover what I could do to help, I learned many things about Jobra, about the poor people, and about their helplessness. I came face to face with the struggle of poor people to find the tiniest amounts of money needed to support their efforts to eke out a living. 1 was shocked to meet a woman who had borrowed just five taka from a moneylender and trader. The condition of the loan: She would have to sell all her products to him at a price he would decide. A five-taka loan transformed her into a virtual slave.
To understand the scope of this money-lending practice in the village. I made a list of the people who had borrowed from the money-lenders. When my list was complete, it had 42 names. These people had borrowed a total of Tk. 856 from the money-lenders. To free these 42 people from the clutches of the money lenders, I gave them the money to repay the loans. The excitement that was created in the village by this small action touched me deeply. I thought, "If this little action makes so many people so happy, why shouldn't 1 do more of this?"
That's what 1 have been trying to do ever since.
The first thing 1 did was to try to persuade the bank located in the university campus to
lend money to the poor. But the bank manager refused to do that. He said, "The poor do not qualify to take loans from the bank they are not creditworthy." I argued with him about this for several months, but 1 couldn't change his mind. So 1 offered to become a guarantor for loans to the poor. The bank agreed to accept this proposal. By the middle of 1976,1 started giving out loans to tire village poor, taking personal responsibility for their repayment. I came up with some ideas for making it easier for the poor people to repay the money they had borrowed. These ideas worked. People paid back the loans on time, every time.
It seemed to me that lending money to the poor was not as difficult as it was imagined. But I kept confronting difficulties in trying to expand the programme through tire existing banks. Finally, I decided to create a separate bank for the poor. Finally I succeeded in creating this bank in 1983. We called it Grameen Bank.
Today, Grameen Bank is a nationwide bank serving the poor in every single village of Bangladesh. It has eight million borrowers, 97 percent of whom are women.
Grameen Bank even gives loans to beggars. They use the loans to start the business of selling goods from door to door, rather than begging door to door. Beggars like it. We now have over 100,000 beggars in this programme. During the four years since this programme was launched, over 18,000 have
quit begging.
This idea of small, collateral-free loans for poor women, known as" microcredit '’, or "microfinance", has spread around the world. There are now Grameen-type programmes in almost every country in the world. We even run a programme named "Grameen America" in New York City. It is now branching out to Omaha, Nebraska, and San Francisco, California. Even in the richest country in the world with the most sophisticated banking system, there is a need for a bank dedicated to serving the poor.
POVERTY IS NOT CREATED BYTHE POOR
When I meet Grameen Bank borrowers, I often meet mother-daughter and mother-son pairs in which the mother is totally illiterate, while the daughter or son is a medical doctor or an engineer. A thought always flashes through my mind: the mother could have been a doctor or an engineer too. She has the same capability as her daughter or son. The only reason she could not unleash her potential is that the society never gave her the chance. She could not even go to school to learn the alphabet.
The more time you spend among poor people, the more you become convinced that poverty is not created by poor people. It is created by the system we have built, the institutions we have designed, the concepts we have formulated. Poverty is an artificial, external imposition on a person. And since it is external, it can be removed.
Poverty is created by deficiencies in the institutions that we have built. For example, financial institutions. They refuse to provide financial services to nearly two-thirds of the world's population. For generations, they claimed that it could not be done, and everybody accepted that explanation. This allowed loan sharks to thrive all over the world. Grameen Bank questioned this assumption and demonstrated that lending money to the poorest in a sustainable way is possible.
During the current financial crisis, the falsity of the old assumption became even more visible. While big conventional banks with all their collateral were collapsing, microcredit programmes, which do not depend on collateral, continued to be as strong as ever. Will this demonstration make the mainstream financial institutions
change their minds? Will they finally open their doors to the poor?
1 am quite serious about this question. When a crisis is at its deepest, it can offer a huge opportunity. When things fall apart, that creates the opportunity to redesign, recast, and rebuild. We should not miss this opportunity' to redesign our financial institutions. Let's convert them into inclusive institutions. Nobody should be refused access to financial services. Because these services are so vital for self-realisation of people. I strongly feel that credit should be given the status of a human right.
POVERTY BELONGS
IN MUSEUMS
Every human being is born into this world fully equipped not only to take care of himself or herself, but also to contribute to the well being of the world as a whole. Some get the chance to explore their potential, but many others never get the chance to unwrap the wonderful gifts they were born with. They die with those gifts unexplored, and the world remains deprived of their contribution.
Grameen has given me an unshakeable faith in the creativity of human beings and the firm belief that human beings are not bom to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty.
We can create a poverty-free world if we collectively believe in it. a world in which the only place you would be able to see poverty is in poverty museums. Some day, school children will be taken to visit these poverty museums. They will be horrified to see the misery and indignity that some human beings had to go through. They will blame their ancestors for tolerating this inhuman condition for so long.
To me. poor people are like bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed from the tallest tree in a tiny flower-pot. you get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted, only the soil-base that you gave it is inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds, but society never gave them the proper base to grow on. All it takes to get poor people out of poverty is for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty' will disappear very quickly.
TO BE CONTINUED