Visiting a Village--Part 1

Written on 02/08 at 03:26 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: philosophy Business environment brown micro credit News

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Andy and Jill with a Grameen Bank Center Manager and Borrowers

If you talk to anyone at Grameen Bank they will tell you that the real bank can only be found by going to the villages where Grameen operates.  Grameen, after all, means rural, and in fact by law Grameen can only operate its lending programs in the villages.  It is for this reason that on our third day in Bangladesh we--Jill, me, an Australian named Mark, our translator Matin and Mark’s translator Yunus--are all crammed into a mini-van barreling down the roads that lead to Rashahi, the zone that we will be visiting. Traffic here is an eclectic mix of motorcycles, bicycle rickshaws, cars, trucks hauling absurdly large loads and comically unstable buses all chaotically weaving and swerving, honking and narrowly avoiding catastrophe. 

After 6 hours of bouncing along these roads we are happy, if not relieved, to have arrived at the Branch that will be our home for the next 10 days.  It is a two-story building--the first occupied by Grameen--with two small rooms for guests.  In order to understand where branches fit into the Grameen hierarchy, I need to take a moment to explain how the bank is organized.  For in truth, Grameen is nothing short of an organizational miracle.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that while Dr. Muhammad Yunus is praised for recognizing that the poor can be credit worthy, his real, lasting achievement is in the details of how he goes about delivering that credit to them in a cost-effective manner.

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A Story on Super Bowl Sunday

Written on 02/07 at 06:26 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: philosophy

This morning I was thinking about the fact that throughout America people today are resting, attending church and making preparations for watching the Super Bowl, while at the same time in Haiti, in Iraq, in Myanmar, and in so many unknown villages, slums and cities around the world there are people deprived of food, justice and dignity.  And it occurred to me that the great responsibility of living in a free society is to strike a balance between fully enjoying that freedom--and the comfort and security it affords--without turning a blind eye to the lack of freedom elsewhere.  How do we confront the horrors of Haiti without reducing our own hearts to rubble? Yet if we can look at these things with clarity and not turn away, then we can find sustainable, practical solutions. 

Yes, that is our task.  What follows is the story of how I came to that realization.

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First Experiences With Bangladesh and Grameen

Written on 01/08 at 03:16 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: philosophy Business environment brown micro credit

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This photo shows one of the Grameen center meetings

First Impressions of Bangladesh and Grameen Bank

When Jill and I landed in Dhaka on Sunday the city was shrouded in an intense fog that, we later learned, is quite common this time of year.  The scene when we walked outside the airport was pretty much what one would expect of a third world capital city: people everywhere; rickshaws competing for space with taxis and buses and all manner of other vehicles, human, animal and fossil-fuel powered; bustling markets; polluted air, etc.

We were taken to the Grand Prince Hotel and then immediately met up with our interpreter, Matin, who accompanied us to Grameen Bank’s head office.  Our first adventure took place when Muhaimeen hailed a bicycle rickshaw that, in just three chaotic minutes, brought us to the office.  Amazingly, Grameen, a Bank that exists for and is owned by the poor, has a 21 story head office, one of the tallest buildings in the area.  One can’t help but feel that Grameen is a kind of conglomerate for good: leveraging all the ingenuity, efficiency, scale and power of corporations while being driven entirely by the motive to eradicate the world of poverty, of pollution, of injustice.  The numbers are staggering: Grameen has 8 million borrowers, 97% of whom are women and all of whom are poor.  They have 20,000 employees, a staggeringly high repayment rate, 4 million bank accounts for non Grameen borrowers (all borrowers must open an account so that they can deposit their required weekly savings there), and have turned a profit all but three years of operation.  Lastly, they are 95% owned by the borrowers themselves--each borrower gets a share in the company--and 5% owned by the Bangladesh government.  In short, Grameen’s Nobel Peace Prize was well deserved.

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First Blog Post From Bangladesh--Actually, From the Bahrain Airport

Written on 01/03 at 03:09 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: Business environment brown micro credit News

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This photo is from our first flight from Boston to London on 1-01-10

Jill and I are currently in the airport in Bahrain waiting for the third, and final, leg of our 28 hour trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh.  We left Boston on the first of January at 7:20 PM and arrived in London at 6:50 AM on the second.  As you can see from the photo above, we really lucked out in terms of our seating on the first flight: we got the seats that are usually reserved for flight attendants when they take naps on long flight; as a result, we had seats that could recline all the way down (even though we were in coach) and we had as much leg room as we could possibly want!  The flight went smoothly and, as I have been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich--an absolutely fascinating history of Hitler’s Germany--the time passed rather quickly.  Our second flight took us from London to Bahrain, where we are currently in the midst of a seven hour layover before one final flight to Dhaka.

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Reducing “The High Cost of Being Poor”

Written on 08/15 at 06:11 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: brown micro credit

I originally wrote this article for The Capital Good Fund’s blog

Here’s a simple dilemma that plagues many American families: how does someone that lives from paycheck to paycheck and is without a credit score—and therefore without a credit card—afford to cover unexpected expenses between paychecks, such as fixing a flat tire, a doctor’s visit, or even regular expenses such as groceries and phone bills?  For higher-income families, this simply is not a problem.  For one thing, consider how often you use a credit card to make purchases; doing so enables you to delay paying for the item until you have received your paycheck and can afford it.  And of course, being higher-income by definition means that one can most likely already afford most expenses that occur between paychecks.  But in the case of lower and moderate-income families, a lack of access to credit combined with a lack of savings forces them to so-called payday lenders to make ends meet during the week.

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Green Microfinance: Advancing Social Equality and Environmental Sustainability in the United States

Click here to download a PDF of my complete thesis. Questions and comments are much appreciated!

My masters thesis in Environmental Studies at Brown University looks at how microfinance--the provision of small…

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A Solution to the Limited Success of Micro-Credit in the United States?

Micro-credit has undoubtedly been a runaway success in developing countries as a tool of both poverty alleviation and economic development.  To date, some 100 million people have been reached by micro-loans, and Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank…

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Tonight, the Oneness of Things

It is late and my mind should be drifting through the colorful abyss of deep sleep, yet instead i find that tonight sleep will not come.  I am like a hungry flower who dreams of bees so ardently that all…

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