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our guest today is muhammad yunus winner of the 2006 nobel peace prize and founder of the micro credit movement
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based on the idea of making very small loans to the world's poorest people thereby giving them the opportunity to
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raise themselves and their families out of poverty thank you for joining us thank you people often associate good
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works and worthwhile causes with non-profit institutions but you have emphasized that your model
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is a for-profit one not a non-profit one can you briefly describe that model and
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tell us why the distinction is so important to you well that's how we became i mean we are
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not trying to create a non-profit that was not our intention my intention was to
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persuade the bankers to lend money to the poor people so my struggle always with the bankers
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so initially i offered myself as a guarantor and then took the money from the bank
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and gave it to people so it was an extension of banks activity when we saw that it's working well and
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the banks were not as enthusiastic as we were we thought maybe we should have a separate bank created for this purpose
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and finally we did that in 1983 called grameen bank or a village bank so we became a bank because it is a
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bank's activity we lend money to the poor people and people sometimes refer to us as an ngo so we have to
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explain that we are not an ngo it's not that we are saying belittling ngo that they are not
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good i'm good it's not like that simply stating a fact that people get confused because we work with the poor
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people then it must be an ngo he said no we are a bank and it's owned by the poor people
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uh so the owners of the bank are the borrowers of the bank so that's the distinction that we want
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to make we clarify what we are well obviously grameen bank has grown dramatically over the
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since the time that you founded it i've read that you now have operations in
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more than 100 countries and you have 7 million borrowers in bangladesh alone but your success with grameen has led to
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a lot of other people entering the micro credit area some of them are commercial banks
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some are funded by venture capitalists how has that changed the micro credit model and can you explain
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you know some of the issues that have come up as a result of that yeah just a little clarification we
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work or at least the grameen idea has been working in almost all the countries of the world so it's
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now not right to say a hundred countries uh they're at microgravity so you're
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even more successful at least the idea has spread that whether they are big or small or successful or not that there
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are presences presence in all those countries and right now we are nearly eight million borrowers within
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grameen bank itself so that way grameen bank also has expanded within bangladesh yes lots of organizations
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have come come in and we have encouraged them to come in and to do the job ngos have done that in others than that
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when the world becomes popular the idea becomes popular many people want to join those kind of
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things so the word microcredit became very popular microfinance became very popular
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and those were not using these words before suddenly they started using it like agricultural banks around the world
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saying that we do microcredit never said that before so whatever they do whether they are
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micro credit or not this is a debatable subject because uh we define micro credit micro finance
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in a certain way like this is a credit and a financial service to the poorest people without collateral
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without guarantee uh and without any lawyers in the system so that has to be very
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clear in our work before we call it micro micro credit or microfinance and this is focused more on women
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poorest women so these are the aspects if you look at the agricultural banks for example
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most of the agricultural banks around the world require collateral you have to bring your land records or
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whatever it is similarly savings and loan association saying that we do microcredit
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cooperatives are saying we do micro credit uh those who are giving agricultural loans commercial
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banks are saying we are doing microcredit so we need to kind of clarify what is microcredit
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in its pure form rather than bring everything else and microcredit is always given to
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for income generating activity so whatever money you are taking you're investing it
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to create an income source for yourself there are many programs which give loans
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for buying consumer goods and they say we are doing micro credit they are giving money to
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buy refrigerator or buy television we say we do micro credit we say no sorry that's not microcurrent
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so we have to sort this out and another aspect that i want to draw attention to there are many
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microcredit programs going around and they're advertising themselves saying oh
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this is a great opportunity to make money there's a huge big field out there a lot
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of people and you give money and you make a lot of money and they encourage people who want to make money
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to join in and do that again we say look our purpose is not to excite people about making money and
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getting excited about that our purpose is to help people get out of poverty so everything you do uh the focus is not
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on profit marketing focus is on helping people to get out of poverty uh so those who are taking this as an
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opportunity to make money have to uh raise their interest rate to the extent that they make a lot of money
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so interest rate issue becomes a sensitive issue we are saying interest rates should be
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kept down as low as possible preferably to cover cost and if you want to make a little profit
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on top of it it should be very modest profit so that it doesn't look like this was
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your intention so those who are doing that using microcredit microfinance uh for uh
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making a lot of money uh we kept saying that these are not microcredit in the sense that we do it
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because we came here to fight out the loan sharks not become loan shots ourselves so this
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is they're moving into the direction of loan sharks so we want to disassociate disassociate ourselves from
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them so how do you tackle that does some regulation is that some regulation required and what kind of regulation
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should there be within bangladesh we have been talking about regulation we have created
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a within bangladesh government has created a microgrid regulatory authority with our
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suggestions they have done that so they will be looking into the interest rate issue transparency issue
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many people quote their interest rate in many many ways hiding the actual fact how much
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they are charging we said it has to be very transparent all interest rates should be expressed in a
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standardized form so that we can compare a and b who charges more or not or less this is something that they have
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to clarify right away and also to keep the interest rate as low as possible this is
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an encouragement regulatory authority should be put again and for personally i have been promoting
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the idea that true macro of credit interest rates should be within a particular range i said cost of fund at
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the market price plus 10 this is the green zone of micro credit interest rate you are legitimate you are doing
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excellent work if it is cost of fund at the market price plus 10 to 15 percent we say your
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interest rate is in the yellow zone you're on the high side but still will consider your genuine microcredit
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program and we encourage you to push yourself back into the green zone and it's the other one the cost of fund
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at the market price plus 15 and above then we say you're in the red zone meaning that you are too high and you
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are on the wrong side of micro credit you are moving into the loan shark zone you have spoken about the downside of a
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global globalized economy referring to it during the nobel peace prize ceremony in oslo as
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quote a dangerous free-for-all highway whose lanes will be taken over by the giant trucks from powerful economies
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even as bangladeshi rickshaws will be thrown off the highway end quote i'm assuming you're referring
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to the one-dimensional profit motive of these giant trucks that focus more on money than on social good
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but how do you think how do you think a scenario could could realistically be averted a
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global scenario and in fact isn't that somewhat desirable uh i was giving an image that
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globalization is like a multi-lane highway all the products are moving back and forth in many directions
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and everybody on the road carrying their merchandise and giving the idea that big countries
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big economies rich economies will have more merchandise to carry big trucks to carry
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and very powerful and take over the lanes and the small countries don't have space
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for themselves because it's all taken over by the big trucks and the big companies
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so i said if that image fits into the picture then we should have traffic rules so
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that little company and the little country little economy have their safe lanes where they're slow moving
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their carry little thing and very fragile but they move safely uh so the the big trucks don't take over
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everything so the and i'm saying that if we accept the traffic rules idea then we'll need traffic police so
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that these rules are obeyed and the idea is to have a traffic authority so that somebody has to say
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this is the rules of globalization that if you are a big company you cannot come
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to a weak economy and say i take over the whole economy they can because they have the money power
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so that will be wrong globalization in globalization both sides must be the winner
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and the whatever gain in the trade takes place it should be shared equitably just because i have the power i take out
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out of 100 i take 99.9 and give you 0.1 percent and say this is globalization i don't
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think that will be tenable that will be sustainable so we have to agree how much you should
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get and how much i should get although i could have taken over everything but by agreed
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principles we don't do that we give you some and we keep some and what that participation would be how
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division would be that would be the traffic police or the traffic authority will decide
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that this is how we should do that otherwise globalization will become i suggested that it will be an economic
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imperialism that big economy has taken over the small economies well one effect we see of globalization
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right now is what's happening happening in the world banking industry and why i find that very
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interesting is because if you were to look at grameen's own borrowers they're not just the subprime or are
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considered subprime but or even the sub subprime in spite of that growing repayment rates
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are 99 or so and you uh have never required a bailout uh from that perspective i wonder how
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you see this global banking crisis and what advice would you give to the ceos of institutions like
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citibank or bank of america about what they could do to salvage their operations
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it's a paradoxical situation right now because back 33 years back when i was trying to
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start this program in a tiny village with a few people and arguing with the bankers that this
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would be a good idea to give loans to the poor people their argument was that poor people are not credit worthy they
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will never pay back and so on so today 33 years later you can ask the same question who is creditworthy
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the answer obviously will be very different because is the poor who turned out to be the
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better credit worthy than the other category of people because the programs micro credit programs all over
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the world still function very well still their repayment is very high whereas the big banks and their big
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lending operations are in a situation of collapse is falling down so with this experience kind of
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contradictory experience that we have now we have to we have no other way but to redesign the
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whole system recognizing the fact the strength in this non-collateralized loans for the poor
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people and the weakness in the cholera right along for the rich people so we have to found find a ground where
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we can have a an inclusive financial system where nobody will be thrown out of the system uh not the
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poorest person not the homeless person or a beggar person nobody should be thrown out they can handle
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they have already shown examples so on and created a long-term credit um record that what
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they have done so this is one lesson from this to redesign the financial system another point i would like to make that
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this global crisis financial crisis uh is worst in our lifetime when the whole world is going through it
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while we look at the crisis part of it we forget this is also the greatest opportunity
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when the system is not working that's the time you unpack it and redesign it so that not
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only it works it works better than ever before uh unless we do that we'll be committing
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a big mistake so i i emphasize on the opportunity part of it while the crisis will take its time we
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take its course to get or get through it but we should be focusing attention and then start redesigning piece by
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piece where it needs to be fixed so that we don't have the same old system that we had before what qualities does
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one need to lead a microfinance institution and how are these different from the qualities needed for another
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type of organization uh one idea i was just mentioning that we came from the direction where we wanted to
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bring financial services to the poor people to help them generate income for themselves and gradually move out of
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poverty by doing that build confidence build experience and step by step take care of themselves and see that
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they can move on and get out of poverty so we would like to keep microcredit in that fashion
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in that mood not profit maximization mode because then you are not looking at people's condition you are looking at
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your own condition so you want to take out as much possible as possible to improve your financial strength and
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so on so that is i think number one requirement for microcurrent that you have the right
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kind of attitude and right kind of mood when you get involved with it that here i have come to use my talent
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my creativity my management skill to help people get out of poverty uh without losing money
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losing money pushes you into another direction it becomes uh to it pushes into itself into the
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charitable kind of programs micro credit is not a charity program micro credit is a business program but
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business with a social purpose and in a certain separate way i've called it a social
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business and defined it in a very clear terms what a social business like so ideally i would like my credit to be
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a social business where profit is zero for the person who has invested but the company can make profit profit
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stays with the company with the social objective in this case the social objective will be to help
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people get out of poverty but but in terms of individual leadership skills or organizational skills how do you nurture
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these within individuals in sacrament bank we didn't come in bank we just recruit people and
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let them learn by doing as apprentices with other older persons in the branches so it's
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not a classroom training which makes all the difference classroom training is a very small part
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of our training we simply introduce what we do and then let them figure out what how it
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is done and so on when they join brahmin bank for them as just a job they are looking for job not many jobs
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are available they got the job they're very happy they got the job they think now on
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i get i work and i get my salary so the intention of helping poor and all those things
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was not part of that job but once you start working with the poor people and get to know the system
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get to know the objectives of the system and gradually you are taken by it and more and more you feel
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inspired by it and all these ideas that yes my work helps people excites them it's a wonderful experience to be able
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to touch other people's life it's almost intoxicating experience once you have it
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you cannot get away from it you want to have it more because you see things are happening in people's life
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their children going to school the kid you saw a little kid running around in the village now you
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see he or she is in school and doing very well and talking about what he wants to be what
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he wants to be and you remember your own childhood that how you went through and how difficult
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it was for you now these kids are lucky kids they could have been they they are in school and some of their
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older students are now going to higher education and government bank gives them education loans and you say oh nobody
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gave me an education loan and my education finished after high school i couldn't
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proceed any further only job i could get is this one but i'm happy through my job i'm helping
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other kids to go to higher education becoming doctors engineers and university professors and so on so forth
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and that excites them that yes my service is useful one of the really interesting aspects of grameen's
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operations is the way you have been able to extend the concept of microfinance beyond just credit into
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areas such as health insurance i wonder if you could explain some of those activities
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and how they have evolved what some of your challenges have been we do not consider macro insurance or
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health insurance as outside the financial service so we take it as a part of our activity as a bank's
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activity we started with giving credit at the same time taking savings so it's
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always together savings and credit formed our basic tool and then we encourage them to
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go into other directions about the health and other issues and gradually we introduced insurance
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programs life insurance it was our first insurance program that we did and the loan insurance that we did
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and then we introduced the health insurance program and we saw that we can give the health
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insurance facility but how do we ensure they get the health service because the existing health service is
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not a very reliable health service we started creating uh health services through a separate company we created
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called grameen colon wellbeing through that we started setting up clinics in the villages with the
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professional doctor on the top of the clinic and then paramedics and the health workers with
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the pathological lab attached to it so that you don't have to go to the city for simple
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pathological testings and so on so everything is self-contained and today we run about 51 such clinics
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and on an average they make about 93 of the cost they cover another seven percent we can cover
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easily if we could retain the doctors in this clinics that became a big problem doctors don't
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want to stay in the village the way uh the kind of clinics that we operate in the villages
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so most of the time almost half or one third of the doctors are missing so that's why our popularity in the area
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is not as high as it should have been so now we are trying to redesign it do it in a
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different way trying to set up a program at the village level what we call grameen
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health management centers where our focus would be on prevention our focus is the healthy people first
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and then to the sick people and the sick people we say this is where we do the early detection
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and early treatment without relying on the doctors in the village so doctor will be in the city wherever
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they are we are trying to link the doctor and the patients through information technology mobile phone in bangladesh is
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everywhere like many other countries now mobile phone is a common phenomenon even in the poor
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families you'll see mobile phones very cheap so what we're doing and these phones are
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internet enabled phones it also carries the internet service so for internet service you don't have to
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worry every single piece of space within bangladesh can receive internet services
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through the mobile phone so we want to do the diagnostics and plug it into a mobile phone transmit all
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the images and all the data to the specialist doctor in the city who can analyze it and tell you what the
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problem is and talk to the patient on the mobile phone and some intermediary young
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girl who can go go between the patients and the doctors to carry on all these services
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so this is the new idea that we are promoting and the health insurance is a very
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popular one i must say provided we can guarantee that they get the services we promised
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is there a plan to extend this further with google we have been discussing with many
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partners already we have created a social business with intel corporation it's called grameen
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intel company in bangladesh and through that company we are bringing mobile phone services in the villages
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with healthcare software included into it their initial one that we are doing with that is a
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series of questions that we place before the pregnant mothers and the questions are designed in such a way
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by evaluating the answers the doctors can tell you whether she has a risky pregnancy
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say immediately you have a first choice that we have screened off one risky pregnancy
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then you can concentrate on that one and gradually we'll be moving into ultrasono
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bring the ultrasono in the family uh the house to do the image of the baby inside the home and transmit it to
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the doctor and the doctor can tell can fully confirm it that yes she has a problem and we can zoom in to
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that particular patient and so on so we'll be we'll be discussing with other companies like
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google uh i'll be in this trip i'll be meeting the google people to talk about
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it one of the idea that i'll be discussing with them is to how to capture all the patient data
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simultaneously as we meet the people talk to people all these comes in a way that you can put in a
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central server through google and you have a global patient data available and you can
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analyze them you can you can find out the incidence of each diseases how the treatment is working which
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treatment is working how they are improving and so on lots of information can come out of that
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there are many ways you can do that very simple now the technology is available uh it can be almost costless
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but at the same time extremely valuable information about the healthcare so we want to see excite google and
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others to get involved google already has a lot of healthcare related programs but we are trying to
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see how to extend the service into the area that we face and collaborate with them
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by basing your model on getting funds from the borrowers rather than getting say investment money
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from international investors does that give you enough money to to make as many loans offer as many
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services as you could or do you do you think that outside money actually could play a role
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as long as it doesn't dilute the primary focus which is social good and not making money
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within coming bank we are allowed to take deposits from everybody it's not related limited to the
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borrowers only it's just like a bank we can take anybody's deposits so that's open with incoming
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each of our branch is required to make enough deposit mobilize enough deposit to carry out all the lending they do so
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that branches don't have to borrow from the head office don't have to borrow from
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another branch so they are self sufficient with their money on top of it we encourage them to
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build up enough cushion of safe reserves of the deposits because of the problem of disasters we have very
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frequent disasters at time of disasters you can't get your money back but you need to lend money more money
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than you did before to get people out of the problem they have faced so we want to build up that cushion
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usually we recommend at least uh 30 and 33 reserves should be kept within that system
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today we have more than 30 percent reserve 37 is up in our all our in the whole of grameen bank some
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branches have more some branches have less but the average of 37 percent we have no problem
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with the deposits we have enough deposits in that so we the question of borrowing from
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outside never occurred to us because we have enough money and i keep telling people that um literally
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no matter where we live we live in an ocean of money but the problem is the poor people
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cannot take a seat out of it that's the problem shortage of money is not there so people have plenty of money
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they put in the bank people will be very happy to the branch came near their home because villages
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don't have branches of banks banks are all concentrated in the cities so if they have to put the money in the
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bank they have to go to the city and the town where the banks exist bank brands exist
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so grammy bank works in the villages so it's a very convenient place people withdraw their money from the cities put
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it there near home because it's handy they can go anywhere anytime they go one they want to pick up the money so we
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have enough of that money and we do not see any reason that it will ever dry out
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having said that what is the amount of deposit coming from the borrower themselves
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we lend out over 100 million dollars a month through grameen bank today out of that
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money uh nearly half of that money comes from the borrower's own deposits so it's quite a substantial amount of
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money the borrowers to put in and that money keeps growing because everybody's
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putting additional deposits every week so it keeps growing and growing so they they have their own savings account at
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the same time other people can put in money there sometimes we see that maybe in certain brands we have too much money
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that whether we should do keep that level of deposit without expanding the business we encourage them
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to expand the business rather than build up too much deposits you had referred earlier to the idea of
00:28:36
a social business and you explained how that differs from a conventional business and one example of that
00:28:41
is grameen denon foods what i find really remarkable is that you are able to produce
00:28:48
uh power yogurt or shaktidoi for five cents for an 80 for for an 80 gram cup how can you explain
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how the economics of that works and whether that model is scalable yes very much because
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it's a business that's what the whole idea is should be running as on business principles that
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you have to cover your cost and generate some surplus so that the business can keep running
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but the idea of social business is investors have invested the money not for the benefit of their own it is
00:29:21
invested to achieve a social objective in this case of grameen danone objective is to bring nutrition to the
00:29:28
malnourished children what we have done we put all the micronutrients which are missing in the
00:29:33
children in the yogurt and make it very tasty children love it they pay that five
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cents to buy a cup and if a child eats two cups a week and continues to do so for eight to nine
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months he or she gets all the micronutrients back and become a healthy playful child
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so that is the objective of the company so that is how it is done and others it's a
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cause it's a question of how much it cost milk costs how much processing costs
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equipments and distribution costs and so on once you're in social business lots of costs go down because you don't
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need to incur those costs for example you don't know any elaborate or fancy marketing
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because as long as people know what you're doing and they're interested in
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it but so you don't have to go until television or newspaper uh we are here and life is uh
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meaningless without eating uh uh shakti we don't say that we explain what it is
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as the people come and gradually the spreads and that's it so the marketing cost goes
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down and we have in our design we made it sure that the extra costs are cut off trimmed off for example we made
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it this very small plant so that you don't produce too much around your own plant
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there's enough consumers to bite rather than go at a long distance the idea is to cut down the cost of coal
00:31:07
chain if you are producing in a big plant you have to carry all this to long distances and you need cold chain
00:31:13
and cold chain is a very expensive item so we reduced that we eliminated that so
00:31:18
our idea is to have many many many small plants all around the country so that you reach out to everybody this
00:31:24
is number one plant which is already operating then we are getting ready for the number two plant
00:31:29
we want to have about 50 plants to cover all the children in bangladesh and each one is self-contained each one
00:31:35
makes money prof it will cover the cost and so on sometimes you get through difficulties like suddenly during the
00:31:42
food crisis last year the milk prices jumped we couldn't maintain that price
00:31:50
tag that we had on the product so we are wondering what we should do we came out to many kind of alternatives
00:31:57
to keep the prices down at the same time without losing the micronutrients and so on
00:32:03
so quickly we came out with the shock to drink so that the milk becomes less other
00:32:10
elements becomes more water and other things but keeping that and have a good taste for it
00:32:15
keeping the price lowest before but we are lucky milk prices went down again we continued and so on
00:32:22
so we have to cope with those kind of fluctuations without losing the whole focus of the company
00:32:29
in addition to uh grameen danone and intel i think you have a relationship also with basf for any malarial nets
00:32:37
do you have any joint ventures or partnerships with other companies in the works
00:32:41
yeah many countries many sorry many companies are coming up with ideas to work with us for social
00:32:48
businesses and we're giving them ideas one already is in operation as a very
00:32:53
important social business that we have right now is a grameen violia violia is the water
00:32:58
company it's a french water company one of the largest water company in the world
00:33:03
many of the u.s cities are served by violia for their water so we this giant company
00:33:10
we persuaded them to create a tiny little uh water treatment plant in the villages of
00:33:16
bangladesh to serve 50 000 uh people in the village because our problem is a big problem
00:33:24
in bangladesh with arsenic in our water very high level of poison in the water and millions of bangladesh
00:33:34
almost half the population of bangladesh bangladesh has a total of 150 million people
00:33:39
so half the population is 75 million they drink water with high level of arsenic
00:33:47
so we are putting up this company to supply clean violent quality water to every
00:33:53
household in the village and they will be paying for it very small amount nobody will
00:33:59
mind paying for that and it will cover all its cost and it will become a social business
00:34:05
really it's not there to make money out of it but the fact that people are drinking
00:34:10
poison every day now we can do this we can overcome that nothing is happening through any other program so we said
00:34:18
let's move on and do that so this becomes another example of social business and
00:34:22
once you can do that successfully for 50 000 people in the village you have developed
00:34:30
a seed then all you need to do is to plant the seed in other places because each one is self-contained so
00:34:38
you can do as many as you want and cover all the people so development of the seed is the most important thing
00:34:44
in social business like gaming is a seed now you can take it you can take it anywhere in your
00:34:49
country we have been already approached by india we have been approached by china
00:34:54
they would like to have remainder known in china and india and some places because they have the same problem
00:34:58
malnutrition is a very common problem so if this one works and health authorities
00:35:04
are saying that yes this is a big problem and this works and we have invited gain
00:35:11
global alliance for improved nutrition which is a big ngo based in geneva concentrates on the
00:35:19
monitoring of the nutrition situation globally to monitor whether this is really true
00:35:25
whether this is just a gimmick that we do or is a real are the children benefiting and the
00:35:30
nutrition level is increasing and so on so you have the grameen denon and you have the grameen violia grameen intel
00:35:37
and there are some in the pipeline and very interesting programs like one shoe company very big show company
00:35:45
we have they approached us what can we do said well one i would say you have a theme and the
00:35:51
theme would be your motto would be nobody in the world should go without shoes as a shoe company this is our
00:35:57
responsibility make sure to do that so you come up with shoes that the poorest people can afford
00:36:03
it's a good quality with your brand name so that it's not a second class third
00:36:06
class thing so you take the ownership of that shoe and make it very cheap they like that idea then i suggested why
00:36:14
don't you start with making shoes for under one dollar so you cover the people who can who
00:36:22
never be able to use that brand name shoes in their lifetime ever but now every kids everybody will be
00:36:28
doing that and so on so there are many in the pipeline basf is one already signed agreement will do the mosquito
00:36:34
nets treated mosquito net and also nutrition sachet for pregnant women and malnourished women because women
00:36:42
nutrition is uh again another area where uh it's not as satisfactory as you would
00:36:48
like to be so this company would be producing that and and make it possible for everybody to
00:36:55
afford that nutrition at the same time while we are having this nutrition supplement we'll be focusing
00:37:00
on the diet itself because it's not forgetting about the diet and just going to the artificially taking the
00:37:08
nutrients inside the body so we'll be also encouraging them to have right kind of food as they go on you've
00:37:16
been dedicated to the microcredit concept long enough to be able to observe the children
00:37:22
of that first generation of women that you helped going back to 1976 and the 27 dollars that you loaned to 42 women
00:37:29
in a small village how are these children who are now adults doing are they creating jobs for other people are they
00:37:35
starting their own companies are they adding societal wealth to the community and just by the very fact that these
00:37:41
this new generation of of people still need help does that suggest that you have a long way to go
00:37:47
with micro credit or how does that what does that say about the success of the movement
00:37:53
microcredit is the first step you build up step by step many other things like insurance program savings program
00:38:01
and many other programs around it we have encouraged the borrowers of grameen bank to send the
00:38:08
children to school because they themselves are illiterate their their husbands are illiterate
00:38:13
their parents are illiterate so we thought let's break that circle here send the children to school so that your
00:38:20
children will be educated and they will be literate at least and we succeeded in doing that
00:38:26
having all the children in school so that was a very happy kind of experience for us that uh
00:38:33
not only we're giving them loans to the borrowers but at the same time we have
00:38:36
helped them to send their children to school and then we saw lots of these children
00:38:43
are doing excellent results in the schools some of them coming up at the top of the
00:38:47
class so we kind of got thrilled by the performance of some of these kids coming
00:38:51
from totally literate totally poorest family coming to the class with everybody else
00:38:57
now he or she is in the top of the class so we thought this should be celebrated
00:39:01
so we started introducing scholarships for all the top performing students and grameen bank gives over 30 000
00:39:09
scholarships every year now it's growing it's 40 000 and so on every year
00:39:14
because the number of children are growing then we saw many of these children coming close to higher education and
00:39:21
they have difficulty in getting into higher education because they don't have the
00:39:24
money to pursue the higher education but the quality-wise they're as good as
00:39:27
anybody else so immediately we introduced education loans so that they don't have to worry
00:39:32
about money so the money is our problem you concentrate in their education so we
00:39:36
started giving education loans and helping them to higher education right now there are
00:39:41
more than 35 000 students in under education loans going to medical schools engineering schools
00:39:46
universities so almost in every single public university and public medical schools
00:39:52
and engineering schools there are grameen children who are studying there so a whole wave of new children are going
00:40:00
into that so they when i meet them they will always discuss an issue which is worrying them about
00:40:07
the jobs after we finish our job can you help us find jobs and how am i going to find jobs for them
00:40:16
so i started thinking about it and then giving them a new idea that maybe they shouldn't be thinking about
00:40:24
jobs uh and we tell them look you are children from gaming families you are gaming
00:40:29
children your thinking should be different than other children other than other people other children they worry
00:40:35
about jobs you shouldn't be worrying about it you should be taking a pledge and repeat
00:40:40
this pledge every morning you wake up and your pledge is i shall never seek job from anybody
00:40:47
i'll create jobs this is my mission so you are not job seekers you are job givers so think in that
00:40:54
terms because your mother you are a first unit child your mother owns a bank not many children
00:41:02
have that fortune you have that fortune so your mother's bank has enormous amount of money so money is
00:41:09
not your problem your problem is what you do with your money so think of what what you can do as you go into education
00:41:16
and do that and then if you feel frustrated you cannot come up with an idea think about your mother what she did
00:41:24
she didn't wait for anybody she took the money and went for a business herself she's an illiterate
00:41:31
woman and along the way she was successful step by step she went on and sent you to
00:41:36
school now you are in a higher education with her bank and what good is your education if you
00:41:43
cannot do better than your mother if she can do it you can do much better that's that's the thing that you have to
00:41:48
prove to yourself that what you your mother gave you a chance and you make use of it and the use is that you
00:41:55
create a job for others so and start a small and expand it as you grow and bring in more people to help you to grow
00:42:04
so you don't have to wait to finish the school and get a certificate in education
00:42:10
when you use it for getting a job you need a certificate right you don't need a certificate when
00:42:15
you go into business yourself so when you're in school you start the business
00:42:18
at the same time continue with it so this is an idea that we are trapped and some of them are taking this idea
00:42:24
and started borrowing from gaming bank and getting into business themselves to link
00:42:29
what you just said to uh what we were discussing earlier about social business what kind of social businesses could you
00:42:36
start around education and is grameen involved in any any such activities we along the health side what we have
00:42:44
done we are in the process of finishing it this year we are starting a nursing college
00:42:49
as a social business because nursing is a good profession we'll be giving nursing degrees to the
00:42:56
young girls from grameen families so they're coming from the poor families going to nursing college and grameen
00:43:02
bank will give the education loans so that they don't have to worry about money where the money is coming from
00:43:08
and the college will cover its cost and they will get the jobs and will produce the nurses in
00:43:15
a way that they'll be internationally acceptable level of education they're a big shortage internationally
00:43:21
about the nurses there's a big shortage within the country so each girl will have a choice
00:43:26
whether she will work in the country or should go outside so this is a social business and i said
00:43:31
i don't have to limit myself to one nursing college i can have a series of nursing colleges they are paying for
00:43:37
itself why can't you create as many as you want because there are millions of
00:43:43
young girls waiting around sitting around doing nothing because they have no opportunities i can create some
00:43:47
opportunities for them they change their life they change the society because now
00:43:52
they go out of the village and they go out and work in their hospitals and so on and go outside the
00:43:57
country and learn languages and so on so this is another example of social business we want to do a medical
00:44:03
college in the same principle because medical college also can cover its own cost and produce doctors
00:44:09
doctors with this different kind of orientation than they normally have and normally a doctor a student
00:44:15
doctor is planning to when i finish my education i'll start my career and i'll make a lot
00:44:22
of money and that's focus usually happens so this orientation will be that when i come out
00:44:28
i want to make sure i can help the health situation in the country and focusing on the poor families so how
00:44:35
do you do that kind of thing and having a very high quality of education so that
00:44:39
you have international links you don't feel that you're left out because you concentrated on a certain
00:44:44
kind of thing and you get involved with research of the health issues and so on so that's
00:44:49
another social business could come out so education even in education you can use the idea of social business
00:44:56
is there anything that's happened in the micro credit movement or in your own
00:45:00
life as it relates to this to this work that has changed the way you view microcredit is there's something that
00:45:06
said oh have you ever said to yourself oh i should do have done this instead of this
00:45:10
or i should be doing this instead of this have any of your initial assumptions changed over the years
00:45:16
some basic assumptions remain same we have expanded it lots of other things came we thought
00:45:22
let's try this one and we tried it and it worked we felt happy about it um if you just look at the reflect what
00:45:29
i have done if i have to do anything differently probably one area probably i would have done
00:45:34
differently uh when we began in 1982 there's a tremendous amount of enthusiasm among the donors
00:45:43
to give us money because we had a small project they wanted to help us and we were very reluctant to take money
00:45:49
because we had plenty of money at that time because we were a small project we didn't need any money we had no idea
00:45:54
about taking money but they kept on pressuring pressuring us and the central bank with which we
00:46:00
were working and finally central bank yielded because they thought why not if they want to
00:46:05
give money let's take some money it's a loan not even a grant from ifa international
00:46:10
fund for agriculture development so in 1982 we took the external money before that we never had any external
00:46:15
money and the donors other donors came in they wanted to give us more money so we thought why not once we have taken
00:46:23
one we can take two we can take three we have started taking it and lots of money
00:46:27
kept coming and we kept on expanding then one complaint kept coming saying that well
00:46:32
grameen bank works because it gets a lot of money and that's what donors keeping it afloat
00:46:39
i said no that's not true that's not what we were in we didn't need the money they gave the
00:46:44
money so we took it so in 95 we decided not to take any money at all because we thought we can do it
00:46:51
ourselves so from 95 on we never took any external money it's an entirely local
00:46:56
money local thing so if you have to go back i would have changed that 82 decision
00:47:01
never taken it never take any money so that that confusion was not created for a long time people
00:47:07
said well the donor has to be there otherwise they cannot survive these are donor kind of
00:47:12
uh supported program which stays alive i said that's a very wrong idea because
00:47:17
that's not how we wanted to work and that's how to uh we never worked right so that's one
00:47:22
change i thought i should have done i have one last question how do you define success
00:47:29
just like any other case that whatever your objective was if you came to that your success it depends on what your
00:47:36
objective was how do you relate it yes we made it in our case we wanted to bring credit to
00:47:44
the poor people and the saving services to the poor people and people said it would never work we
00:47:51
hope that it will work and it did and then say well it may work in one village it won't work for two
00:47:56
villages we did they said maybe 10 villages it don't work if you grow big it will collapse
00:48:02
you're stretching your luck too much we did so that is a success that even beyond
00:48:08
what we imagined we never thought that we can continue uh with this such a repayment record years and years
00:48:19
because organizations get weakened or as you grow big your management becomes a problem
00:48:26
and this was a big worry for us as we grow can the quality of administration quality of management
00:48:33
continue to grow with it or deteriorate it because you're not running it yourself anymore you're
00:48:38
depending on hundreds and hundreds and thousands of young people who just came to know about it
00:48:45
marginally knows about it we leave everything in their hands and the decisions but it worked
00:48:51
and then say it may work in bangladesh it don't work outside so now as i said it's worked all over
00:48:56
the country all over the world in many countries they said well our country is not like bangladesh we don't
00:49:01
have such a huge density of population and not so much poverty concentrated in our population
00:49:08
so in our country it won't work we said well you debate about your country in bangladesh
00:49:14
give the task to us we go and do it for you and uh they accepted that many countries did
00:49:20
that so we started doing that we did it in turkey we did in kosovo we do it in costa rica guatemala in
00:49:26
china india many places to demonstrate those kind of things and we started one in new
00:49:31
york city last year it's called grammy in america we do the same kind of work that we do
00:49:37
in the villages of bangladesh and the beautiful results we have more than 600 borrowers in
00:49:41
new york city all women five-member group weekly repayment savings two dollars each week
00:49:49
we have given loans to all of them an average loan is 2200 repayment rate is 99.3 percent
00:49:58
no collateral nothing so it works uh i would say the id strength of the idea that
00:50:05
it's not country specific or people of particular locations specific it's a global it's a human thing it's
00:50:16
not something that works with one particular trait of character of a particular community
00:50:24
thank you very much thank you thank you so much for joining us thank you well thank you for giving me this
00:50:38
opportunity