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Muhammad Yunus is a financial pioneer who
has turned upside down the way banks look at their customers.
He is the founder of the Grameen Bank in his native Bangladesh
and the architect of the micro-lending revolution that is
changing lives in places as far from Yunus's home as inner-city
Chicago.
In Give Us Credit, Alex Counts follows
the lives of Grameen borrowers in Bangladesh and would-be
entrepreneurs in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, where
the Full Circle Fund, a scheme based on the Grameen concept,
operates. The borrowers are all women, all working against
great odds to become economically independent. Their stories
are dramatic and powerful: The women in Bangladesh battle
against the monsoon, disease, and the prejudices of their
menfolk, while in Englewood, the crime and decay of the
inner city ensure that each day is a struggle to survive
and to make ends meet.
Counts tells how Yunus came upon his idea
twenty years ago, after lending a few dollars' worth of
cash from his own pocket to indentured laborers and poor
farmers in his famine-ravaged and economically crippled
homeland. The borrowers were able to start their own small
businesses -- buying a dairy cow or a rickshaw or tools
to make fishing nets or stools -- enabling them to accumulate
a little cash to build a house, educate a child, or fend
off starvation. Yunus institutionalized his idea into the
Grameen Bank, and in spite of the fact that the bank's borrowers
are required to be the poorest of the poor, without
assets for collateral, Grameen has a near-perfect repayment
rate. In Bangladesh, Grameen now disburses $500 million
a year to 2 million borrowers; the idea has also spread
to the United States and throughout the world. Perhaps 10
million people now benefit from small, unsecured loans that
have financed the transformation of their lives. As Alex
Counts demonstrates, micro-lending could make a significant
contribution to more effective foreign-aid policies toward
impoverished countries like Bangladesh, and to the domestic
alleviation of poverty at a time when the federal government
is cutting its spending at all levels.
Muhammad Yunus has said that "access
to credit should be a human right irrespective of economic
situation." Give Us Credit is the inspiring
story of the genesis of this idea and of its realization,
and shows how Yunus's belief has made an impact on the lives
of women from two very different cultures who share a desire
to transform their own lives.
Alex Counts, a former Fulbright scholar
in Bangladesh, has worked for nonprofit organizations, including
RESULTS and CARE, since graduating from Cornell University
in 1988. A native of New York City, he now lives in Dhaka
with his wife, Emily. This is his first book.
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