By Carmine Paolo de Salvo
In this guest post, I wish to focus on my direct experiences of a famous experiment in development, one which is meant to bring prosperity and progress to those that have never experienced it. I refer to the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and I am sure that the readers of this blog will know what the Grameen Bank is, so I don’t need to spend any time explaining it.
As with many people around the world, my interest in Grameen Bank was triggered by the award of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to it and to its founder, Dr. Muhammad Yunus. After reading “The Banker to the Poor” (Yunus’ bestselling autobiography) and finishing my studies, in September 2009 I went to the Grameen Bank headquarters in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to spend there a month as an intern.
What I want to do in this post is to compare briefly what I had read in Dr. Yunus’ book and what I actually was able to see during my experience in Bangladesh. I honestly believe that in the book there is little that can be considered false, but, at the same time, the impression that Yunus gives of the Bank’s activities is, in some respects, misleading. My opinion, of course, is not based on any robust statistical evidence, but was rather built directly in the villages in which Grameen operates, among real people, notwithstanding the limiting but necessary presence of an interpreter (I’m not so fluent in Bangla, sorry!). I am not going to share my ideas on the classical critiques that are raised against microcredit (in particular the level of interest rates due to high management costs and the support it gives to a petty form of entrepreneurship, which many don’t consider helpful) because they are already well-known and it would take me too long to repeat them here. I will instead limit my comments to three points that caught my attention and on which I would be interested in hearing feedback from others with greater expertise in the field.
