High fives and shouts of joy were prominent amongst RESULTS volunteers when the news hits the airwaves on October 14. The reports were that Dr. Muhammad Yunus, a member of the RESULTS International board for 18 years, had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Grameen Bank which he had founded in 1983 in Bangladesh.
Since the 1986 inception of RESULTS Canada, which works for an end to poverty and hunger, our partners have seldom been more enthusiastic. Yunus has many times been a speaker at our annual international conferences in Washington DC. Most of us, during activist letter-writing sessions and meetings with our Members of Parliament, have shared videos featuring Yunus' microcredit strategy.
Cathy Little, our national manager attended a Dialogue Program in Bangladesh with fellow RESULTS volunteers from around the world in 1995 and personally met with Yunus and visited with loan officers and borrowers. The firsthand exposure to this powerful program in action was at times overwhelming and often poignant.
Now, finally, the world has an opportunity to know, up close and personal, the visionary contribution of this great man, based upon the most simple of concepts—the poor will use wisely and repay small loans and credit, and that the recycling of money is a powerful weapon against poverty.
A bit of history on the newest Nobel winner. Thirty years ago, Muhammad Yunus met an impoverished Bangladeshi woman who worked long hours to weave and then sell small bamboo stools. In order to purchase the 15 cents worth of materials, she borrowed money from loan sharks at ten percent interest per week. Her average profit per day—a staggering two cents!
It became Yunus' conviction that the masses of poor Bangladeshis who were eking out a living through small entrepreneurial activities, with no access to affordable credit, were proving by their very survival that they were credit worthy. He made himself the guarantor of a small loan from a local bank, subdivided the money, and made loans at a fair interest rate to a small group of very poor working women. Not surprising to him, the loans were repaid and the recipients flourished.
Despite replicating these successes many times, Yunus could not convince traditional banks to adopt the strategy, so he founded an independent institution, naming it the Grameen Bank. Grameen, appropriately, means village or community. Since poverty alleviation was his motivating force, he decided that women, with their devotion to the well-being of their children and their lower social status, deserved to be the target population.
Grameen grew rapidly and, in the next two decades, the strategy was reproduced by hundreds of institutions worldwide. By 1997, nearly 8 million poor people had taken micro loans. And remarkably, the repayment rates were consistently in the high 90s.
In 1986, Yunus met another microcredit hero, Sam Daley-Harris, founder of the anti-poverty organization RESULTS. Sam soon made the expansion of microcredit a pillar of RESULTS work.
Convinced that the microcredit strategy must expand more rapidly, Daley-Harris established a RESULTS partner organization in 1997, the Microcredit Summit Campaign. He relinquished day-to-day control of RESULTS and devoted himself to cajoling the world's political, social and banking leaders into pledging and planning for the distribution of 100 million micro loans by 2005.
Data to the end of 2005, just in this month, reveals the phenomenal success of this initiative. The number of borrowers globally is over 113 million with 82 million amongst the abject poor, those living on less than one dollar a day.
At the Global Microcredit Summit held November 12-17 in Halifax, Canada, Daley-Harris and Yunus will announce to over 2300 delegates from more than 100 countries that the campaign's two new goals are to reach 175 million borrowers by 2015, the end of the Millennium Development Goals, and to ensure that 100 million of these borrowers have risen above the level of extreme poverty.
Daley-Harris, Yunus and RESULTS have also set their sights on the planet's largest provider of development assistance, the World Bank. Despite this institution's stated mission of alleviating poverty, it currently commits only one percent of its enormous resources toward the expansion of microcredit programs. Since Canada is a major provider of the World Bank's funds, we are in a position of some influence, and our MP's have considerable leverage regarding World Bank policies.
We at RESULTS Canada are requesting that the World Bank at the very least double their lending for microcredit, ensure that poverty targeting measurements are used, and that impact studies are done to ascertain that borrowers are actually climbing out of poverty.
What can the average citizen do to make a difference and help convince CIDA and the World Bank to support the expansion of microcredit? We can inform ourselves more by visiting www.resultscanada.ca and www.microcreditsummit.org, then write letters and talk to our parliamentarians about increasing support for this powerful initiative that Canada can easily champion.
And now, we can use our own funds just as Muhammad Yunus did in the early days. This week, Citizens Bank announced that they will offering there version of a Shared World investment fund where Canadians can invest their RRSP's to be put to work in the developing world as revolving microcredit loans.
What a powerful example of a win-win! We get to save for retirement while simultaneously helping millions of the poorest climb out of the depths of poverty with dignity and self-esteem. Sounds like the kind of Canada we all want to be part of.
Cathy Little is a physiotherapist in Calgary, Alberta and part time national manager of RESULTS CANADA, a non-profit organization dedicated to the alleviation of hunger, abject poverty and debilitating diseases in our world. Dr. Bob Dickson is a family physician in Calgary and a partner with RESULTS CANADA.
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