Grameen Bank

Projects need not be only infrastructure related. Consider the tremendous success of the Grameen Bank which was started in 1983 in Bangladesh, and now disburses over $500 million a year, provides employment to 14000 people, has 1600 branches, works in 55000 villages, and has more than 4.89 million borrowers out of which 96% are women. No collateral is needed if you want to borrow money from the bank - only trust is sufficient. No borrower is taken to a court of law in case on non-payment. No borrower signs any legal instrument. Yet the bank is so successful and has recovery rates of 98.93%. It has not taken any donor loans since 1995, and has made a profit each year. It now has beggars as members, gives housing loans for the poor, support micro-enterprise loans, life insurance, pension funds, retirement benefits, scholarships, and educational loans as well.

One of the biggest successes of the Grameen Bank has been the telephone ladies, where almost 150000 ladies borrowed money from the bank to purchase phone services, which they now resell to the rest of the village on a public phone basis and earn a living through that. This is a superb example of how one development can lead to another. An Economist study shows that an extra 10 phones for every 100 people increases the GDP by 0.6 percentage points.

Take a look at the website.

A recent article in Business Week is about the vision of Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank. They are diversifying from micro-credit to telecom, health care, and much more.