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 in Ideas Blog

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 in Ideas Blog

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.