[p2p-research] Non-failure of microcredit

Thu Aug 27 22:09:29 CEST 2009

It is a dagger to my heart to see this open knowledge community start a thread called failure of microcredit. I leave you to judge whether it is a dagger to what you stand for too.

Microcredit as innovated in 1970s Bangladesh is a system which like any system has core rules which if you break them compounds opposite consequences

Microcredit's system design has NOT failed; what has happened is big banks and others have spun imitations whose rules were tampered with to spin opposite results. Its pretty amazing we are having this conversation when the reality is the failure of 99% of banking that isnt microcredit - at least I thought that was lesson of wall street last year

Microcredit uses money's exchanges to create a lifetime community club owned by the poorest- they define what they want the surplus of the bank to be invested in next to end poverty- in bangladesh their choices that were researched "16 decisions" before grameen was founded  by bangladesh law as a bank owned by poorest .
Two 2 minute lessons 25 from 10000 free dvds on microcredit http://yunus10000.com 

5

 Poor women primarily demanded invest in our children's health, education and the ecologies of our communities.

In Grameen microcredit: every 60 rural women are allocated their own village CENTRE in which they peer to peer mentor each other both in income generation and in solidarity. The broken system that had trapped them had treated them as an underclass. Before anyone joins grameen they are inducted in 5 days of training based on Paulo Freire and others which also teaches those who are illiterate to write their own signature for the first time in their lives. That's a symbolic beginning to the spiral of self-respect -and communal trust - that any real microcredit system aims to nurture.

Over a generation this has had very fortunate consequences. Grameen invested the poor's money in connecting the village centres through shared mobile phones (a microcredit franchise for microentrepreneurila village women) at a time (1996) when a world bank report had said that only quarter of a million people would ever use mobiles in Bangladesh. So it got the franchise at pennies in the dollar. It connected 140,000 village center hubs that had previously had little opportunity to share their end poverty knowhow. Bangladesh now has 40 million mobile users and is to mobile infrastructure design and partnerships worldwide http://www.grameensolutions.com http://bankabillion.org  what india is to the internet. Grameen is today as much about digital networking solutions for the poor as it is about banking or any other life-shaping service in the village. Yunus's acceptance speech surprised the Nobel audience by saying he wanted to be asked to help open
 source micro every system design solution - in health, energy, media, education ... not just banking.

 If you actually visit Bangaldesh you see the only nation in the world whose vibrancy is designed round microeconomics not macroeconomics.  They call the missing system design which they have been integrating micro up for a third of a century social business http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8130130.stm http://www.yunuscentre.org 

IT (BANGLADESH MICRO) ALWAYS WORKS
clinton youtube on this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB1tSDXbOzg

To be taken in by big banks who sponsored propagation of the lie of microcredit failing is sad. I would like to know how peer to peer knowledge systems in general guard themselves from not being tampered with by lobbyists with huge funds sponsored by those who are compounding an unsustainable globalisation. Some of p2p biggest supporters were involved in faciliating dr yunus 69th birthday dialogues tow months - you can learn from them not a non-expert in p2p like me. Bangkok a centre of p2p has recently become an epicentre of true microcredit http://news.inbangkok.org/?p=587 

For those who want to learn how empowering true microcredit systems are come to kenya april 2010 http://www.microcreditsummit.org The founders of this summit started gaining president elect bill clinton's support for this back in 1992. In 1997 the summit was launched with the most inspiring network goal I have ever heard of - in less than a decade reach 100 million poorest familes with solutions that empower them to end poverty. Those who founded this network commit that kenya's microcreditsummit will be even better than that inaugural yes we can conference of 1997. Can you help them?

John Hatch on Microcreditsummit:
Behold the largest self-help undertaking in human history—bringing hope, dignity, and empowerment to tens of millions of the world’s poor and poorest families. Behold a movement with global outreach, that has penetrated beyond city slums and market towns to even the most isolated villages. Behold an industry that embraces thousands of NGOs, credit unions, public and private banks, and an infrastructure of hundreds of thousands of community-based peer lending groups that are enabling many of the planet’s most disadvantaged households to generate the additional income and savings they need to keep their children alive, nourished, healthy, and able to attend school..

Yes we can was the campaign slogan of the first MCS in 1997, and yes Obama's mother was a pioneer of microcredit in Indonesia. We live in a world  http://erworld.tv that will globalise only one of 2 systems with consequences that my dad who spent a life tme editing entreprenurial articles from a microeconomic lens computed in 1984 to spin 10 times more or less health and wealth by 2024 and in all likelihood sustanianbility's irreversibility. If you are on the side of integrating every community's productyivity equitably into global come to kenya; otherwise please go anywhere else that peers of wall street go.

EF Schumacher put the need to connect end poverty solutions with the bottom-up as simply as anyone:

The heart of the matter as I see it, is the stark fact that world poverty is primarily a problem of 2 million villages , and thus a problem of 2 thousand million villagers. This solution cannot be found in the cities. Unless the hinterland can be made tolerable, the problem of world poverty is intolerable, and inevitably will get worse.

chris macrae 
http://grameen.tv http://brac.tv usa 301 881 1655

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