Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

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It's a hit!

Terrific book by the founder of the Grameen Bank, a bank that started the micro-lending movement to help poor people. The author Muhammad Yunus go... (show more)

Terrific book by the founder of the Grameen Bank, a bank that started the micro-lending movement to help poor people. The author Muhammad Yunus got the Nobel Peace Prize for his life work of providing no-interest loans and banking services to the poor of Bangaladash. As a young college professor of Economics in Bangaladash, he noticed the lack of utilization of a tube well and wondered why the poor people of the village next to his college were not using the well. This led him to do some ethnography to find out about the economic choices of the very poor. He realized that a fairly small sum of money, e.g., $25, could make a life-changing difference to the people. More study revealed the poor couldn't get small loans, the banks didn't make any loans that small and they couldn't make a profit from them if they did. In a very well-written and easy to read fashion, he explains how he came to develop his own bank and suggests the poor know what they need far better than any World Bank economist. This book should be on everyone's reading list! (show less)

 

 

by Candace Cross-Drew

No, it's a flop!

Wonderful concept, amazing achievments against many odds, a true contributor to emmulate... was surprised how ego-centric the tone of this book was... (show more)

Wonderful concept, amazing achievments against many odds, a true contributor to emmulate... was surprised how ego-centric the tone of this book was, however, given what this man has done with his life, maybe it was just the writing style and the fact that he was writing in a non-native language. (show less)

 

 

by Anonymous User

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  This was an excellent book and one I would highly recommend . In Muhammad Yunus's own words:

  I have always believed that the elimination of poverty from the world is a matter of will. Even today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn't be poor.
  When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most o... (show more)

  This was an excellent book and one I would highly recommend . In Muhammad Yunus's own words:

  I have always believed that the elimination of poverty from the world is a matter of will. Even today we don't pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder, they wouldn't be poor.
  When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding a solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution for poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the iniative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences. (show less)

   

   

  by John Livingston on Mar 19, 2009 at 03:35AM

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  The remarkable story of a remarkable person who decided to change the world and set out and did just that.

  Yunus wrote the book before receiving his Nobel, and judging from his moderately self-aggrandizing style, it takes more than a bit of self-promotion to beat out everyone else in the world for the prize -- though it's not excessive or a major distraction from the story. The asides on basic economic theory were instructive.

  There is something ironic, though, in the fact that the vas... (show more)

  The remarkable story of a remarkable person who decided to change the world and set out and did just that.

  Yunus wrote the book before receiving his Nobel, and judging from his moderately self-aggrandizing style, it takes more than a bit of self-promotion to beat out everyone else in the world for the prize -- though it's not excessive or a major distraction from the story. The asides on basic economic theory were instructive.

  There is something ironic, though, in the fact that the vast majority of his readers are probably educated middle-class first-worlders, and thus very removed from both the rock-bottom destitute people that have benefited from Grameen, and the rarified elite world (Fulbright scholar Ph.D, and lots and lots of connections in the Bangladeshi government) that Yunus was part of and without which he could never have made his vision come true. (show less)

   

   

  by Paul Richter on Jul 25, 2008 at 03:07PM

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