A champion of yes we can
by
SAM DALEY-HARRIS*

Decades ago the economics professor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate described his search for new bank clients as a process of “looking for the most timid.” He was not looking for the villagers who were the first to step forward to ask for a micro-loan starting at less than $10, he was looking for those who were last to come forward and who trusted their abilities the least. To those villagers he and his staff would say, “Yes you can.”

Thirty-three years later, nearly 8 million members of Grameen Bank (a total of 40 million when you count their family members) are saying “yes we can” to the whole world. Since its inception, the Grameen Bank has lent more than $8 billion to the poor in Bangladesh.

So how does one start an enterprise that reaches nearly 40 million people in one's own country and touches the lives of tens of millions more in replications around the world? Yunus had his own “yes we can” moment as a young economics professor who faced an agonizing famine that left him doubting his value as a teacher and as a human being.

Turkish poor people are also saying “yes we can” with microcredit. The Turkish Grameen Microcredit Program (TGMP) was launched in 2003, as a joint venture between Nobel laureate Yunus's Grameen Trust and Professor Aziz Akgul's Turkish Foundation for Waste Reduction. The TGMP's main objective is to reduce the number of Turkish citizens who live below the poverty line through a Turkey-wide Grameen Microcredit project based on the principle that the poor have skills they can utilize in self-employment ventures if they are given access to capital in the form of credit.

Currently, the TGMP operates in 33 cities, out of 49 branches and has reached more than 25,000 women (a total of 125,000 people when you count their family members) with more than $21 million in microcredit loans. The TGMP is the first Grameen country operation to introduce a paperless loan management system using contemporary information technologies, achieving significant operational efficiency. The TGMP intends to reach all 81 cities in Turkey and the 100,000 poorest Turkish women by 2010 to socially and financially support their endeavors to break free from the poverty cycle. The TGMP's ultimate mission is to help Turkey overcome poverty by enabling broad access and effective oversight to sustainable microcredit lending.

Yunus was so shaken by the sight of people dying of starvation that when he set foot into Jobra, the village next to his campus in Bangladesh, all he wanted to do was to see if he could be of use to one person for one day -- not 40 million -- just one. It was in that village that he met a stool maker who horrified him when she explained that she earned only two cents a day for her beautiful craftsmanship. With no money to buy the bamboo she needed, Sufia Khatun was forced to borrow from a moneylender who demanded that she sell her finished stools back to him at a price he set -- a price so low that she made only two cents a day profit.

When he asked whether she could earn more if she was freed from the moneylender, she told him, “Yes I can.” Yunus had a student look for other villagers who were in the same situation. The student found 42 people who needed a grand total of $27 to pay-off the moneylender, buy their raw materials and sell their wares to the highest bidder. That's right; all they needed was an average of 68 cents each. With her loan of less than $1, the stool maker's profits soared from two cents a day to $1.25 a day.

Now Yunus has set his sights on the titans of business and industry with his social business concept, and the chairmen of Danone, Intel and BASF are beating a “yes we can” path to his door to create new nonprofit or non-loss businesses that have improving people's lives as their sole goal. The corporations can recover their initial investments in the social businesses, but after that all profits are plowed back into these new companies. They include a joint venture with Danone to produce nutritionally fortified yogurt for malnourished villagers, another with BASF to produce chemically treated bed-nets to protect people from mosquitoes carrying malaria and still another with Intel to bring information technology solutions to rural villages.

When the US president shakes the hand of the Bangladeshi micro-banker at the White House ceremony this week, Obama will be touching his own past and the microfinance work his mother did in Indonesia. When Yunus opens the Microcredit Summit next April in Nairobi, Kenya, the micro-banker from Bangladesh will launch the next phase of microfinance in the birthplace of Obama's father and throughout the continent.

President Obama should accompany Yunus to that summit in Kenya to join in the micro-banker's most inspiring appeal -- a daring call to put poverty in the museums where it belongs.