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Grameen BRAC ASA
Donated by Y10000 & worldcitizen.tv - journalists for MICRO -washington dc bureau 301 881 1655
World's Most Valuable Brand: What Youth chooses to action for and around the planet
7 summit wonders of MicroWorld :
If ever a generation's time to change global tracks (from being ruled by macroeconomics and compound risks like subprime to mapping microeconomics to sustain every community rising) it is the next 12 months
We believe that Bangladesh's 100000 servants (30 years of testing social business models) of microcredit and micro-everything-
community-sustaining - eg health , education, energy, water, media , governance, mobile knowledge - have the maps that every youth around the world should know exists as micro's choice of how the future can be http://www.wholeplanet.tv/id32.html
We have been extraordinarily fortunate to be piloting a 10000 youth dialogue with Grameen leaders connected by Dr Yunus which includes 10 hours of orignal videos mainly made in Dhaka - here is a sneak preview- any errors are solely the fault of your blog editor (chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk usa 301 881 1655 ) .
version 0 sneak www preview - target launch Minus 4 weeks
Here are some action links we are designing to connect the 10000 network of owner of dvd on sustainability happenings which Dr Yunus, Grameen and Bangladesh are inviting people to practice
other videos to come from yunus archives eg the Ning Chinese youth memorial video nad greenchildren videos if any are in dhaka
Blog year2008 in october is about ending poverty
http://events.takingitglobal.org/20255 so we hope this week's syndication to 100 blogs will exponentialise to tens of thousands of blogs by then, with a little help from friends like you
sustainability club
http://sustainabilityclub.comsocial business club
http://www.socialbusinessclub.netcollaboration cafe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9nL_a0K97Iyunus 10000
http://yunus10000.com collaboration coordinators for youth dialogues in that city and between cities together with invitations to action specific to each video good news story - eg if you want microcredit to beat off big banks why not help any school try out micro credit with the world's simplest program small change, big changes - a microloanfoundation franchise
Peers across hemispheres and I are far more interested in ensuring that each of these intercity movements vetoes any uses of 20th c failing system methods that the majority of club coordinators -or where elected an honorary board - vote against, than prescribing revenue models.
OPEN SOURCING THE CLUBS
Obviously we should want coordinators to make a living out of work input whlst at the same time recognising that being a club coordinator is probably worth more than having many a professional qualification - or needs to become so if this world is to be sustainable. Equally where profits are repeatedly generated I assume we can find a way iof agreeing some sliding scale that should be contributed either to your favourite grassroots organsiation in bangladesh or to a small list of other potential grassroots partners of future capitalism which should probably need at least 75 of members refendum to confirm
I am very happy if people will negotiate what other rules they would need to want to participate as well as to clarify where they want diferent contant at the mother webs. The main web system I use costs $35 a year per web so its not difficult to imagine that major cties will also want to set up their own branch web or of course a free blog - either of which we will happily linmk from the top of the mother web.
Obviously some of our constitution needs double checking with for example the 100000 bangladeshi's and other Gandhians who are the main practical exemplar of the values we seek to network worldwide so that the future sustains 7 billion brilliant jobs and goodwill multiplying across all women, children and even men.
We wish to learn from each city's most successful ways of mobilising and cross-cultural celebration, as well as metods for ensuring that any action network actually reaches to those in most desperate need of its service. This is one of the big lessons of bangladeshi experience -reiterated by every micro-system designer in bangladesh we have interviewed - once a networks starts empowering the entrepreneur inside it will never get deeper than the deepest needsholders it begins with. This is a lesson that many global NGOs seem never to have begun to grade.
chris macrae
http://worldentrepreneur.netwashington dc inquiries desk usa 301 881 1655
info@worldcitizen.tv y10000 at facebook
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22045349892
A panel discussion on the life and work of Stanley Ann Dunham was held yesterday at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Alice Dewey reflected on time spent with Dunham, the mother of Sen. Barack Obama, abroad in Indonesia.
facebook group on good news for women -volunteer to be an officer ; when you see an exceptionally good news for woman item add it to our weekly newsletter
what are the best news stories uniting
10000 youth
http://yunus10000.comand
women
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18188015069 -come edit the weekly newsletter uniting these networks sustainable growth worldwide
today's search
http://starbulletin.com/2008/09/13/news/story09.html A woman of the people
A symposium recalls the efforts of Stanley Ann Dunham to aid the poor
By Susan Essoyan
sessoyan@starbulletin.com
Barack Obama's mother was remembered for her passion as well as her practicality, her devotion to detail and her global outlook, in a panel discussion yesterday at her alma mater, the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Nearly 200 people turned out for the Women's Studies Colloquium, hoping to learn more about Stanley Ann Dunham, the woman behind the Democratic presidential candidate.
They saw slides of her in flowing batik skirts, alongside villagers she befriended across Indonesia, where she spent much of her career as an anthropologist.
"I was sitting here squirming -- I really have a hard time after all these years looking at images of my mom without crying, especially now when so much is happening," said Maya Soetoro-Ng, her daughter, who attended the presentation by three of Dunham's colleagues at UH. "There are so many reasons I want her to be here to offer guidance and love."
Dunham died in 1995 of ovarian cancer.
An anthropologist who specialized in handicrafts and rural development, Dunham helped pioneer "microfinance" in Indonesia, getting villagers small loans so they could build cottage industries to preserve native crafts and pull themselves out of poverty.
"She found 'home' everywhere she went and delighted in all of the beauties and layers in each place," said Soetoro-Ng, who teaches at La Pietra-Hawaii School for Girls. "She really believed that every place and every group of people had something extraordinary to give, if we would only pay attention."
"We were both so incredibly fortunate to be raised by a woman who was at once really local in honoring and respecting local ways of doing things and at the same time truly global in her thinking."
Dunham earned her bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Hawaii. Her second husband, the late Lolo Soetoro, was Indonesian, and Dunham immersed herself in the handicrafts of that sprawling nation.
Her thesis adviser, Alice Dewey, said Dunham was ready to write her dissertation on blacksmithing, puppetry, ceramics, basketry and batik but was told to choose one subject. Dunham turned in a 1,000-page thesis, "Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds." It is now being readied for publication in Indonesia.
"Ann struck me as being a very practical person in spite of the fact that she had lofty ideals about improving people's conditions," said Nancy I. Cooper, who did research with her in Java.
Dunham's personal knowledge of handicrafts, down to the mechanics of making them and the challenges of finding materials, allowed her to persuade banks to extend loans of the right size at the right time, Dewey said. Dunham worked as a program officer for the Ford Foundation and as research coordinator for Bank Rakyat Indonesia but was most at home in rural villages.
"She considered peasants just as important as people of high rank," said Dewey, a professor emeritus at UH. "I think she was the hardest-working person I've ever met, and did it without seeming to be. If we have Barry as president and he works that hard, we're fine."
Before her death, Dunham worked in New York for Women's World Banking, a nonprofit group that supports a global network of microfinance institutions.
"We came because we wanted to know what made Barack Obama the kind of man he is today, and we certainly found out," said Yoshie Tanabe, an audience member. She lauded Dunham's "cultural sensitivity" and "common sense," adding, "She's my kind of woman."
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Launch of Future Capitalism book: features Grameen Danone as world's first multinational social business & explains how social business model has been validated from 30 years of developing the microcredit banking sector J1 | Business Week article F29-Yunus world's favourite goodwill entrepreneur whose goal of ending Financial Imperalism is as big as Gandhi’s | | | |
World Economic Forum: Bill Gates joins Leaders of Future Capitalism: J25 | | Parisian business leaders celebrate French edition and Grameen Veolia is announced | Launch of Innovation Bank in Bahrain & announcement of 2 Billion $ inward investment in Bangladesh | Top 25 dialogues of microcreditsummit year 008 are announced. They include industry sector responsibility response to Mexican abuse of goodwill and IP. |
| Doonesbury cheered as inspiring economics correspondent at London School of Economics talk - changing mindsets and mini-professordom is development economics biggest crisis F15 | President Sarkozi orders HEC to provide an SMBA with Yunus a Chair of Social Business | World's G3 : Grameen's Yunus, Genome's Ventner & Google's Schmidt |
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section of mobile mfi banking
IndiaTimes15 may 08
SINGAPORE: Banking regulators still don’t get it: The best candidate for making access to finance truly universal in a developing country is the mobile phone. A report last month by the Washington-based Consultative Group to Assist the Poor shows that in several nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, more people have mobile phones than bank accounts.
The notable exceptions are China and India, though even they won’t buck the trend for very long. “Rapidly growing mobile penetration in both countries means that it is probably only a matter of time before they fit the pattern,” the CGAP study noted. India offers a good example of what’s possible. There are now about 260 million wireless-phone subscribers in the country, more than in the US. Given the rate at which new users are being added, most Indian households will, in the next decade, have at least one mobile phone. By contrast, the spread of banking services is rather limited. According to a survey of 100,000 households by Invest India Market Solutions, only two out of three shopkeepers and half of self-employed farmers have bank accounts.
To attempt to reach bottom-of-the-pyramid customers by building new branches will be prohibitively expensive. Seeking to recoup those large-fixed costs from farmers whose average annual income is Rs 60,000 ($1,400) is a non-starter of an idea because it will make banking services unaffordable. It’s the same story throughout the developing world. Mobile Banking Pakistan’s Tameer Microfinance
Bank estimates the cost of setting up a branch in a shanty town of Karachi at about $42,000; add operating expenses — $28,000 a month — and it becomes clear why so few of the poor people use a bank. That’s where wireless technology comes in handy. A typical
banking transaction automated via mobile phones costs 50 US cents to a bank in the Philippines; routing the same through a branch would be five times as expensive. Globe Telecom, the second-biggest Philippine phone company, has 1.3 million customers for G-Cash, its mobile-payment and remittance service.
. Flexible Regulation With 2 million borrowers, SKS is India’s biggest provider of
small loans. It aims to quadruple customers in two years to become the world’s largest micro-lending business. If mobile-banking regulations ease, “then clearly this is the investment that we’d make,” said Vikram Akula, chief executive of SKS Microfinance. For now, banks in India are taking the lead in offering mobile banking to their existing customers as a value-added product. ICICI Bank, the country’s second-biggest
lender, started its iMobile service in January. Real breakthroughs in financial inclusion may only occur when telecommunications companies lead the effort. Their incentives and skills may be more aligned with handling large numbers of small transactions than a traditional bank’s.
section on world bank's connections with MFI
May08: The International Finance Corp, the World Bank's private-sector lender, said it will invest $45 million (23.1 million pounds) in credit-linked notes issued by Microfinance Institutional Loans for Asia and Africa (MILAA) established by Standard Chartered to expand its lending to the microfinance sector…The transaction will enable Standard Chartered to issue additional credit to microfinance institutions that deliver loans to small companies or to the poor who do not have access to mainstream banking in developing countries.
"This transaction will unlock more funding for microfinance," said Peter Sands, Standard Chartered Group's chief executive, in a joint statement with the IFC. "We believe improving access to finance is a key lever in reducing poverty and catalyzing broader social and economic development," Sands added.
Grameen America Launch
Branche opened in Queens April 08
Npr radio interview broadcast 15 May 08
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90465530
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/12/usaThe world thinks of microfinance as a tool to lift its poorest from grinding poverty. But in an age of pricey fuel and shrinking credit, the entrepreneurial movement that began in Bangladesh is taking off in the richest country of all.
Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus opened branches of his Grameen Bank in New York City this spring, more than 30 years after he revolutionised foreign aid by delivering the first microloan to a group of rural Asian villagers.
If Yunus is the father of microfinance, his US offspring already are maturing quite nicely. The spectre of recession, combined with a diverse array of lending models, is sparking a new demand in America for small loans and business counselling.
"Our vendors report a dramatic increase in microloan applications over the past year," Amy McKenna Luz, who represents nearly 500 microfinanciers as president of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, said. "They say it's a direct result of the banking crisis."
Luz sees her member groups as rescue workers for small businesses, nurturing economic growth and revival even in the direst circumstances. When the owner of Tomas Trucking in New York needed to ship more products to absorb the cost of diesel, a bank could not provide the cash infusion needed to buy a new vehicle and save the company. Microfinance saved the day.
Why has the spotlight shone so brightly on Grameen and not on its industrialised cousins? The answer may be culture.
Almost anyone can send a few dollars to Asia that can feed a family for weeks, thanks to Kiva and other groups that turn ordinary Americans into microlenders. But sending a few thousand dollars to a rural Pennsylvania craftsman is more difficult.
Micro Business Development Corporation, led by Denver lender Kersten Hostetter, has created thousands of jobs and boosted the local economy by more than $15m. Still, Hostetter is so keen for more investment that she has written a unique job ad seeking a celebrity spokesman for US microfinance.
"We're the bridge between poverty alleviation and economic development, the guardians of the middle class," Hostetter said. "We didn't brand ourselves initially because there wasn't a need for it."
Now the need has arisen, partly due to the arrival of Grameen America. Thanks to its Nobel, the bank does not have to rely on Natalie Portman - Hollywood spokeswoman for the international microlender Finca - to create universal appeal.
For its pilot programme, Grameen has targeted immigrant enclaves. There, the "peer lending" model of requiring clients to attend weekly meetings and monitor each other's repayments is most likely to succeed.
In more traditional communities, however, microlenders like Galen Gondolfi have had to perform a more complex version of the Bengali approach.
One client came to Gondolfi, a senior loan counsellor at Justine Petersen in St Louis, was persuaded to pull equity out of her home to expand her business during flush economic times. As global markets fell, her mortgage interest rate went from 6% to 14%, new contracts dried up, and she left stacks of bills unpaid.
Gondolfi performed "a triage of sorts", he recalled, "stopping the bleeding" on her mortgage by negotiating a new rate with her subprime lender while using the house as collateral for an infusion of cash to her company.
Microfinance is not just for the developing world, Gondolfi said: "It's also for the post-developed world. I'm talking about rust belt cities, about urban neighbourhoods I work with that are essentially post-apocalyptic."
Microfinance is also not just for the political right or left. Conservatives have embraced it as an alternative to direct foreign aid that can resemble a handout, while Hillary Clinton helped her husband bring Yunus's ideas to Arkansas in the 1980s.
The failure of the Clintons' microlending effort, called the Good Faith Fund, has tempered the enthusiasm for a similar grassroots push during the current economic slowdown. The conventional wisdom says Good Faith proved that microfinance could not work in America.
Richard Taub, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago who helped with the Arkansas programme, called it "kind of a bummer".
"The cost of the administrative work was very, very high," he said. "We used to joke that it cost $10,000 to make an $8,000 loan."
Taub was also sceptical of marketing microfinance to immigrants who already lend in small amounts to one another, likening Grameen America to "selling coal to Newcastle".
In fact, New York already has a microfinance powerhouse. The local outlet of US-based Accion, headed by Gina Harman, has generated 11,000 new businesses and given $77m in loans since its founding in 1991.
Harman sees plenty of room for Accion and Grameen to work together in broadening the scope of US microlending. Her only worry is that the entire movement could be judged on the success or failure of Yunus's new banks.
"Unfortunately, we're not microfinance rock stars," Harman said. "Right now we're doing a lot of parrying to try and defend an established track record. It works."
The way it works is usually with interest rates of about 12%, higher than bank loans but far lower than the average US credit card. The third alternative for struggling small businessmen are so-called "payday lenders", who charge up to 600% interest and are barred from operating in several states.
Harman said Accion is also encountering more new clients who are desperately fleeing a debt to loan sharks. "It's a very frightening circumstance," she added.
With the economic outlook keeping large banks on the defensive, the number of struggling Americans not getting help is likely to only increase. Demand is already too high for some established microlenders to serve everyone.
"The outsourcing of components of a company, downsizing, the loss of middle-class jobs - all of those are push factors" forcing clients into the industry, Elaine Edgcomb, director of microenterprise research at the Aspen Institute think-tank, said.
Other "pull factors" luring clients also are on the rise, chiefly the stunning growth of immigration in the US.
Given such challenges, microfinanciers are not waiting for their Angelina Jolie to emerge from the wings. McKenna Luz's group will host microlenders from around the country at a summit in California later this month.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria Shriver are slated to attend, and she is hoping that Nobel winner Yunus can speak as well. "It's like Tony Blair trying to make an appearance," McKenna Luz said.
pdp philidelphia story 14 may
http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2008/05/15/lost-in-translationIt was once believed that people in poverty couldn't be given loans — and has made people think hard about the meaning of charity. Yunus believes that a loan provides the borrower with more than money: By successfully paying one off, a borrower gains not only capital and improved credit, but pride, strength and confidence in her abilities. It also makes the lending program self-sustaining: The Grameen Bank hasn't accepted donor money since 1995.
And yet, PDP, which was founded in 1989, hasn't embraced the Grameen model — only 20 percent of the nonprofit's clients end up choosing to take a loan. Instead, PDP invests in development services — technical assistance, computer space, accounting, — which it provided to 400 clients last year. And it is almost completely reliant on donors. It's a classic charity.
Not that it's alone among microfinance institutions (MFIs). PDP Executive Director Leslie Benoliel estimates that there are 500-600 such outfits throughout the United States. How many turn a profit? "Here in the U.S.? None," she says, her tone suggesting there may be something ridiculous about the question.
Is this of necessity? When asked if Grameen-style microfinance could work in a place like Philadelphia, Yunus has expressed optimism, telling City Paper in February: "You would have to tailor your program to those who you want to help ... [but] if it makes sense to you, and it makes sense to me, why not?"
Keith Weigelt, Wharton professor and microfinance expert, takes a softer line. "It's possible," he says, "but I'm not sure that that is the direction that microfinance wants to go." He thinks that the for-profit model probably can work in Philadelphia, but wouldn't be as good for borrowers as in the Third World.
For one thing, starting a business in Bangladesh and starting one in Philadelphia are not similar propositions. In Bangladesh, you can buy a fishing net and start a fish store. Here, a would-be entrepreneur can't just sell fish out of the Schuylkill; he has to deal with tax codes and registration requirements.
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I Was a Clinton VolunteerI Was an Obama VolunteerPhiladelphia Film Festival: Week One ReviewsFeeding FrenzyThe Week In EatsOverused Menu TermsSmall BitesClose-UpsThe Election IssuePhiladelphia Film Festival: Week Two ReviewsWhat's more, Weigelt says, the interest rates that MFIs would need to charge to turn a profit in the U.S. would be extremely high. Even in the ideal situation — an entrepreneur requests a small amount of money to pursue a well-thought-out endeavor — the lender has to review her application, approve the request and make sure the individual receives and pays back her loan. This makes the cost of delivering the loan greater than the loan itself, and, indeed, those nonprofits that have tried to be self-sufficient have ended up charging 80 percent to 100 percent interest rates on small loans. This not only means that someone would be paying back $1,000 on $500 they took out to buy supplies for, say, a cleaning business; it means, as Weigelt says, that it would be hard for the lender to remain "more focused on social justice than making money."
Years ago, Sean Mitchell Caldwell heard a local hip-hop group that he was sure would be big. He pressed 1,000 CDs of their music and went to Columbus, Ohio, to sell them. Several months later he returned with his tail between his legs, having sold a total of three.
PDP may not end up lending Caldwell money, but it's working to make sure he has a viable business plan before he drives to Ohio again. And while PDP's version isn't the "microfinance" most people know — the form used by Yunus — that doesn't mean it's not helpful. It's just that, for once, the American version of something is a little softer, a little less profit-driven than the foreign model. And, frankly, though organizations like PDP have strayed from Yunus' original vision, there is an important theme of his work they continue to reflect. "You can have another orientation" besides the profit motive, he said in that February interview: "How to do good."
On the online auction giant's new MicroPlace site, investors can lend as little as $50 to would-be small business owners around the globe
by Catherine Holahan
Tracey Pettengill Turner doesn't want to give handouts to poor people. But she does want to make investments in them. So on Oct. 24, Turner is launching MicroPlace.com, a Web site that lets small investors provide low-interest "micro" loans, of $50 or more, to would-be small business owners. Her hope is to create sustainable economic growth in the world's most impoverished communities—and do her part to expand the reach of the microfinance industry to more than 1 billion people worldwide, from about 100 million people currently.
Turner's outsized ambitions are backed by an equally formidable player. Internet commerce giant eBay (EBAY) acquired the company in June, 2006, for a small, undisclosed, sum when it was little more than Turner and her business plan. MicroPlace benefits from the lessons eBay has learned working with the millions of small business owners and consumers who buy and sell on its family of sites. PayPal, eBay's online payment service, will process the loans free of charge. "There are a billion people in the world who are self-employed, hard-working, and poor, and we are hoping to scale the industry to at least a billion," Turner says.
Principal Plus Interest
EBay is no stranger to microlending. The company's founder, Pierre Omidyar, and his wife, Pam, have devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to microlending through their foundation, the Omidyar Network. The network is the lead investor in Unitus Equity Fund, an $8.5 million microfinance venture investor that finances projects in Asia and Latin America. Pierre Omidyar also gave a $1.4 million grant for the development of software that helps microfinance institutions collect and organize data. "Microlending is just a good fit for eBay," says eBay spokeswoman Catherine England. "It really leverages eBay's areas of expertise to address what we see as an emerging market." Omidyar is also an investor in Kiva, a microlending site run by former TiVo (TIVO) executive Matt Flannery and former PayPal executive Premal Shah.
The key to microlending, says Turner, is that it fosters self-reliance and, eventually, sustainable economic growth in a way that charity does not. What's more, lenders stand to receive small financial benefits in the form of interest, which should encourage them to keep investing in other projects. The minimum investment for someone to get started on MicroPlace is $100, though subsequent investments can be as low as $50. Interest rates vary between 1% and 4%, depending on the amount and nature of the investment, says Turner. Investors receive a "You've Got Cash" message on the site when they see returns. "The intention is that you get your principal back with your rate of return," Turner says. "The goal is to reach the everyday investor."
MicroPlace cannot guarantee that lenders will make back their principal, much less the interest, but microlending experts say recipients of microloans have a solid track record on repayment. And MicroPlace is working with organizations on the ground in impoverished areas to identify loan candidates who have the potential to start businesses capable of changing family fortunes and creating new employment opportunities in their communities. The site works with the Calvert Foundation, a nonproft that has worked in community investment for 10 years, and microfinancier Oikocredit, which funds nearly 500 projects, ranging from a cassava processing plant in Ghana to small loans to entreprenuers in Bolivia. As the site grows, it plans to expand its partners.
