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Yunus, Muhammad with Alan Jolis, Banker to the Poor, The Story of Grameen Bank, Aurum Press Ltd, London, 1998, ISBN 978-1-85410-924-8, pp 313, Price: UK Pounds 8.99.
It is the firm conviction of Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, that poverty can be eradicated and put away in museums once and for all. As the author puts it, the bottom line of his belief system is that 'poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums'. This is what motivated this stalwart to establish the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the pioneer in the field of micro-finance for the poor. Today, Grameen Bank can boast that it provides 2.5 billion dollars of micro-loans to over two million rural poor in the country.
The book is essentially the memoirs of Yunus charting the obstacles along the way, and with the sheer will and perseverance of the founder and his staff, resulted in it becoming a success story. Yunus started out as an ordinary university professor, when the idea struck him that people were poor because the financial system which could help them simply did not exist in Bangladesh.
To this end, he carried out lengthy `battles' with the World Bank and local banks in his own country, to try and sell them the idea of microcredit loans for the less privileged. Some of his efforts reaped good harvests, but more often than not they proved exercises in futility. In discussing his interaction with the World Bank, he provides startling insights into the workings of multilateral aid agencies, for instance, in how aid projects in the developing world give rise to enormous bureaucracies that are corrupt and...