Peace Prize for Yunus
*You Can Tell That It's Swell; It's Nobel*Seeing all the saturation coverage of the new Nobel Peace Laureate
Mohammed Yunus this week I was struck by how little he's changed since
we shared a pot of cardamom-scented Bengali tea nearly two decades ago.
Still the same twinkle, the same graying mutton chop sideburns, the same
little paunch and the same quiet ebullience.
In 1987, Yunus – founding director of the Grameen Bank – struck me as an
owlishly wise elder statesman, although, at age 47, he was only a few
years my senior. Nowadays, in his interviews, he projects an elfin verve
that makes me feel a bit old. If only I could jinn myself up to such
optimism.
Back then I was a freshly-minted foreign correspondent, having come to
my senses after a brief lapse of insanity in which I took an MBA and
worked as a London merchant banker syndicating Euroloans. With this
background, I landed a job with a Financial Times subsidiary covering
South Asia's economic "liberalization" out of Bombay.
From time to time, I even got to venture into neighboring countries for
"regional color." Stock stuff, mostly, that I'd glean from diplomats,
bankers and local "technocrats" -- glowing paeans to Nepal's
constitutional monarchy, Sri Lanka's tourism boom or the CIA's crafty
use of Pakistan as a platform to mobilize a pan-Islamic /jihadi/ force
against the Soviet puppets in Kabul.
Finding something to cover in Bangladesh proved trickier. The place
didn't even / have/ a financial sector to speak of, nor any discernible
geopolitical importance. Nothing bankable in sight and no visible means
to collateralize any credit.
All that Bangladesh had going for it was nearly 150 million of the
poorest people on earth. This, however, was no mean asset, as a worldly
Belgian development specialist explained to me.
"It assures a perpetual drip of foreign aid, enough to sustain this
complex here and all those out there," he pronounced with a sweeping
wave towards his double-glazed, cool-tint window. Beyond the AC-frosted
pane gleamed the futuristic government and diplomatic tower blocks that
had risen, in the country's brief decade of independence, from the
steamy fens surrounding the old capital, Dhaka.
When I recapped this conversation later that night at the Dhaka Press
Club, my local host, veteran Bangla journalist Sayyed Kamaluddin,
decided I needed to meet Yunus as a corrective to the country's "basket
case" image. He set up an interview for the very next day and introduced
his friend as "a mad Chittagong professor with a sort of benevolent
Ponzi scheme to get beggars to lend each other money."
At this arch characterization, Yunus just shrugged. "Mad you may call
it, but the loans get repaid. And, next thing you know, the beggars quit
begging."
The secret was economies of scale – /micro/ scale. His customers were
beneath the notice of any commercial lender, let alone government
bureaucrats or international aid-/wallahs/.
Why, most of his borrowers were women, who were supposed to be
economically invisible in conservative Bangla society. They lived in
villages (or "/grameen/," in the local language) that were too small to
even appear on a map. But they were visible to each other, and that was
all the "collateral" Yunus needed.
His bank could run with virtually no paperwork – no promissory notes or
loan covenants – since just about every villager knew perfectly well who
was borrowing what and why. The manageable $10-50 loans were always
repaid on time because otherwise the bank’s limited seed capital
wouldn't be available for the next neighbor to use. And that would put
the villagers once again at the mercy of high-handed usurers and /
babu's/ (officials) from the city.
This flew in the face of everything I'd been taught in MBA school or the
Euromoney markets. How could any financial institution survive by
banking on the sheer altruism and mutual responsibility of ordinary
people? Illiterate and penniless peasants, no less.
Well, that's how it /is/ at the micro-credit level, Yunus assured me.
Like sub-atomic physics, the "laws of nature" all change below a certain
scale.
I pitched a Yunus profile to my Hongkong editors, but – after learning
of the Grameen Bank's risibly thin capitalization -- they wouldn't buy
the story.
Since then, of course, the likes of Bill Clinton and Bill Gates – and
now the Nobel Committee – have bought into Yunus' vision of a caring
society. The Grameen model of micro-level self-help has spread beyond
finance into such areas as health care and education, inspiring
imitators on five continents, including North America (in Chicago
neighborhoods).
But I'm still reserving judgment. Back when I had tea with Yunus, his
notions of "social collateral" still seemed pretty theoretical to me,
since I'd never actually been to a Third World village.
Now I live in one. Here in Trinity we may think we're a world away from
the Bengali /grameen/, but there are some commonalities: we, too, find
ourselves on the wrong side of a widening relative income gap, beneath
the notice of such "service providers" as cellphone operators or
hospital management conglomerates. Self-reliance is our only option.
Yet / still/ we're pondering whether it's worth our while for each
household to assume less than $10 a month of mutual responsibility to
retain baseline medical services in the county. For Yunus, I suspect,
this would be a no-brainer. Here, the jury's still out. We'll see on
Election Day.
Labels: Reviews
