An Exciting Update on the Micro-Credit Project!

Written on 09/19 at 02:13 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: brown micro credit

I have some exciting news regarding the micro-credit initiative I’ve been working on. For starters, I just found out that our team was awarded a $2,000 grant by the Clinton Global Initiative!  Student teams from around the country applied for grants for student-led initiatives, and only several dozen projects were chosen out of a large pool of applicants. Needless to say, we are very excited to have been chosen, and the $2,000 will be added to the $5,000 that we’ve already received from Brown for a pilot phase.

The Business Model Is Coming Together
Amazingly, that might not even be the most interesting news regarding the project.  During the last few weeks we have continued developing relationships with community partners, and we are now on the verge of conducting roughly 6 focus groups with potential borrowers to better understand their needs; their business ideas; barriers to implementation; what they are currently doing for loans (loan sharking?); etc.  Our business model is also beginning to take shape.  The project team, which now consists of four students and a faculty advisor, will be developing the business model during the Social Entrepreneurship class that we’re taking this semester.  We spent much of the summer wrestling with the question of whether or not the group lending model employed by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh can work in the United States; in my last post, I wrote about a possible solution to the limited success of micro-finance in the U.S. Since then, we have had some realizations and come across other models that have enabled us to start figuring out the nuts and bolts of how this micro-credit program will work.

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

Written on 08/16 at 10:10 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: featured brown micro credit

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 in Bangladesh, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.  In addition, thousands of micro finance institutions (MFIs) have sprung up all over Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Micro-Credit’s Limited Success in the U.S.
Micro-credit has also made its way to the United States, a country that, despite being the world’s wealthiest, still has a poverty rate of over 13% (in 2006 over 39 million Americans were living in poverty.) In fact, one of the earliest U.S.-based micro-credit initiatives was begun in 1985 when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas and heard of Mr. Yunus’ work; however, the program, called the Good Faith fund, failed, because “the group lending model never caught on.” Since then, dozens of similar attempts have been made, and while many have been successful, the scale pales in comparison to that of Bangladesh and other developing countries.

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Micro-Credit, Major Impact

Written on 07/15 at 01:04 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: brown micro credit

Among my numerous ongoing projects (which include my masters thesis and starting a company) I’m also working with several Brown students to create a student-run micro-credit program in Providence, Rhode Island.  Initially, I had the idea to do something like this around 5 months ago when I read Muhammad Yunus’ autobiography Banker to the Poor.  Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for founding the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh 30 years ago, and bringing micro-credit to the fore as a means of addressing poverty.  After I read his book, I began researching the possibility of starting a similar initiative locally. 

Micro-Credit Serves a Need
Basically, the idea behind micro-credit is that the world’s poorest individuals are often, by necessity, also the world’s most entrepreneurial people. In order to survive they have to find creative ways to create and sell goods or services.  What they lack, then, is not energy or ideas, but rather access to capital.  As a result, they are forced to rely on loan sharks who charge them exorbitant interest rates, keeping them in perpetual poverty no matter how successful their business is.  And of course traditional banks don’t bother providing loans to the poor, both because they view them as an unacceptable credit risk and because the transaction costs of dealing with loans as small as $10 USD are too high for them.

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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…

continue reading »

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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