Posts Tagged ‘grameen bank’
Posted on September 1, 2010 - by M. Bennett
Grameen Grows Its Microfinance Platform on Amazon’s Cloud…
By Penny Crosman Sep 1, 2010
We’ve recorded recently how Grameen Foundation — a U.S.-based nonprofit that builds on the work of Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus to try to “enable the poor to create a world without poverty” through microfinance (very small loans, such as $500) — has enlisted the help of SunGard and ThoughtWorks to scale up its Mifos platform. Mifos is essentially a core banking platform for microfinance institutions, and the organization has brought on four new institutions in the last four months. In an interview a few days ago with George Conard, executive director of Grameen Foundation’s Technology for Microfinance initiative, I learned that Mifos also runs on Amazon’s EC2, which provides scalability in terms of compute resources — theoretically a company can run an application on as many of Amazon’s computers as it wants, on demand.
Although some banks have balked at putting transaction information on an external cloud due to data security and privacy concerns, Grameen seems to have cleared that hurdle. “Using the Amazon service, we know the datacenter where each individual customer’s data is located (in most cases, this is in an Amazon data center in Northern Virginia; we’re currently exploring using a Singapore datacenter through Amazon EC2 to better serve customers in Asia),” Conard says. “These are highly-secured production data centers with all appropriate backups and maintenance.”
Posted on July 13, 2010 - by M. Bennett
Fast Retailing to Set Up JV With Grameen Bank…
Japan’s Fast Retailing, the operator of the Uniqlo casual-clothing chain, said on Tuesday it would start an apparel business in Bangladesh, hoping to help the country’s poor by creating jobs and offering affordable clothing there.
Microfinance specialist Grameen Bank will take a 1 percent stake in the venture, which is slated to start in October.
Posted on June 25, 2009 - by Gavin
MICROCAPITAL STORY: Indian Credit Guarantee Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE) Likely to Extend Credit Guarantee…
Microcapital
The Indian government is considering increasing its credit
guarantee scheme for micro and small enterprises (MSE) in the
upcoming 2009-2010 budget through its Credit Guarantee Trust for
Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE).
The Indian government is considering increasing its credit
guarantee scheme for micro and small enterprises (MSE) in the
upcoming 2009-2010 budget through its Credit Guarantee Trust for
Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE). The existing guarantee for
member lending institutions of this scheme does not cover bank
loans to MSEs that are secured by collateral. A finance ministry
source claims that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has put
forward this proposal and is working on it with the ministry.
Currently the CGTMSE encourages banks to provide loans to MSEs
that do not have any collateral. In return banks do not bear all
the risk in the case of default and do not need to set aside
money for the risk of defaults on these loans.
Posted on June 9, 2009 - by Gavin
Microcredit Loans ‘Used to Buy Food’…
Press Release Point
Fewer than half of microcredit borrowers invest the money in the grassroots businesses that such loans are intended to foster, new research into poverty alleviation has discovered.
But the claim is disputed by some microlenders, including ASA of Bangladesh, winner of the Banking at the Bottom of the Pyramid category in last year’s FT Sustainable Banking Awards.
Microcredit was devised in the 1970s in Bangladesh by Muhammad Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank to lend small sums to rural women to buy livestock or invest in arming activities or small businesses. Mr Yunus won a Nobel prize three years ago for his work in tackling poverty.
Researchers say microlenders have realised that many extremely poor borrowers are using their loans for other purposes, such as buying food reserves.
This shows that the benefits of this fast-growing system to people outside the traditional banking net are not as have been portrayed by microlenders, say the researchers, although they say it does not undermine the value of the system. (more…)
Posted on June 3, 2009 - by Gavin
Micro-credit : Creating real jobs and business in Lyon France…
Digital Journal
Micro-credit has been around a long while of course, and became a household name with the advent of the Grameen Bank, a major player in this field.
Micro-credit exists in many countries and as such doesn’t have a universally defined description due to the differing needs and cultures of the countries in which it is active.
France’s main micro-credit organism is the Adie Association for the Right to Economic Initiative. It was created in 1989 as a small outfit by its present-day President, Maria Nowak, and has since generated the creation of many thousands of small businesses.
One of the criticisms levelled at micro-credit has been that it is no more than a privatisation of public safety-net initiatives and programmes but Adie has overcome this via its statute as an association, which, in France, means it isn’t a private business in the normal sense of the word. This statute also gives it access to many collaborative actions with the authorities. (more…)
Posted on April 24, 2009 - by Gavin
Micro Lending Makes Grameen and Microfinance Last Hope of American Working Poor…
Associated Content
Microfinance giant Grameen Bank offers microcredit to would-be entrepreneurs. Mostly women avail themselves of micro lending organizations, but any small business owner is welcome. Could micro finance make your business dream come true?
What is Microfinance and why is Micro Lending in the News?
As compared to the billion dollar loans currently being written in Washington, microfinance is concerned with loans that are measured in hundreds of dollars, not millions or billions. Perhaps the most famous example of micro lending is Grameen Bank, a financial organization that offers microcredit for the poor.
Grameen Bank, which is very active in Bangladesh, extends microcredit to those who need a $600, $900 or $2,000 loan to start or expand their small, home based businesses. This could be a door to door cosmetics sales business, a bakery, a dog grooming business, or anything else a microfinance applicant desires to engage in. (more…)
Posted on April 23, 2009 - by Gavin
It’s Time to Put Affordable Health Care for the Poor Within Reach…
The Huffington Post
During these times when many of the poor are struggling for a livelihood, health care seems less affordable than ever to so many of the impoverished. A family illness already is the primary force shoving people back into poverty. It’s time for us to offer them the tools to push back.
A major part of the problem is that medical progress today typically arrives in partnership with high cost. As a result, poor people all over the world are left in desperate need of less expensive, but high-quality health care options.
Until recently, this dilemma seemed unsolvable. But new circumstances offer great hope to my own country, Bangladesh, and the poor around the globe, including the United States. Already in the United States, people are taking advantage of much more affordable health care delivery models such as retail health clinics and direct contracts for conveying health services between small businesses and hospitals. Many of the tools and services we are delivering in Bangladesh will inspire new, more affordable models for this cost-conscious environment.
Bangladesh has shown it is possible to make remarkable progress in health status no matter how poor and crowded a country is to start. In the last 40 years, the child mortality rate in Bangladesh dropped from about 24 percent to below 7 percent. (more…)
Posted on April 23, 2009 - by Gavin
“Banker to the poor” gives New York women a boost…
Reuters
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, known as the “banker to the poor” for making small loans in impoverished countries, is now doing business in the center of capitalism — New York City.
In the past year the first U.S. branch of his Grameen Bank has lent $1.5 million, ranging from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars, to nearly 600 women with small business plans in the city’s borough of Queens.
People around the country are struggling to repay mortgages and credit card debts, but Grameen America says its loan repayment rate is more than 99 percent.
“While other banks are collapsing, this one remains strong,” Yunus told reporters at a street fair, where about 100 Grameen America borrowers sold wares ranging from food and flowers to clothes and jewelry.
“Microcredit has been one area the crisis has not impacted. The crisis has not touched it, still it is robust as ever,” said Yunus, who started Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983. (more…)
Posted on April 17, 2009 - by Gavin
Yunus briefs Hillary about Grameen healthcare plans…
The Daily Star
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday received Prof Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Healthcare delegation to the World Healthcare Congress at her office.
During a 90 minute meeting with the 14-member Grameen delegation, Prof Yunus briefed the secretary about Grameen’s healthcare plans and social business initiatives.
Secretary Clinton, who visited Grameen Bank in 1995, and is a long-time proponent of microcredit for the poor, offered her support to Grameen’s healthcare programme.
Prof Yunus discussed, in particular, the proposed creation of a Grameen Medical College and teaching hospital as joint venture collaboration with a leading school of medicine of a premier US university.
Prof Yunus updated the US secretary of state on the latest developments within Grameen Bank. He also emphasized the importance of a new legislation to create microfinance banks in the USA and other countries.
Hillary sought Prof Yunus’s assistance in crafting a bill for that purpose. She pointed out that microfinance can play a key role during the current financial crisis by helping the unemployed generate to create self-employment. (more…)
Posted on April 8, 2009 - by Gavin
Micro-Banking Has a Go in the U.S…
Zacks.com
In 2006, Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus pioneered “micro-credit” with his Grameen Bank concept in India. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for it. This “new” category of banking focused on small loans to poor people who have no collateral and who do not qualify for conventional bank loans.
Considering the state of the economy with US banks running around like “zombies” refusing to lend, small business owners have been unable to access their traditional credit providers. Forget credit cards — a growing number of small businesses have found another portal available.
With “peer-to-peer lending,” a borrower fills out an application (5-20 minutes to fill out) then the lending club (ex. Lendingclub.com and the national nonprofit microlending organization Accion USA) instantly accesses credit information. (more…)
Posted on April 7, 2009 - by Gavin
Microfinace to the rescue…
Westender.com
Nobel Laureate from Bangladesh and founder of the Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus called for strengthening the micro-finance movement particularly in developing countries as one of the options to counter the fallout of the recent global financial crisis. He said that appropriate regulations should be put in place to facilitate the growth of this ’social business’.
Saying that micro-finance movement needed to take deeper roots in India, Yunus said, “India should set up an appropriate regulatory authority for micro-finance institutions (MFIs). Regulations for banks and MFIs should be different as MFIs cater to the poor and should be regarded as a social business as distinguished from the purely commercial banking operation.” (more…)
Posted on April 1, 2009 - by Gavin
New Microfinance Ecosystem unveiled at Sa-Dhan’s National Microfinance Conference 2009…
India PR Wire
Sa-Dhan, The Association of Community Development Finance Institutions, (the national association of 220 community development finance institutions and other sector stakeholders), hosted National Microfinance Conference 2009 at New Delhi under the theme “Microfinance Ecosystem “Equilibrium Between Growth & Effectiveness”.
Nobel laureate and founder of Grameen Bank, Prof. Muhammad Yunus delivered the inaugural address at Sa-Dhan National microfinance conference 2009 here in New Delhi. Prof. Yunus called upon Indian MFIs to keep up the national and international lead in social business. At the conference Prof Yunus said “The bottom is to operate without incurring losses while saving the people and the planet – and in particular those among us who are most disadvantaged – in the best possible manner.”
Prof. Yunus appreciated the example Indian Microfinance gives to the world, with some of the most innovative MFIs and the NABARD-led SHG-bank-linkage programme, which is world’s largest microfinance programme with over 4 crore households reached since its inception.
Posted on March 20, 2009 - by Gavin
Q&A: ‘Meltdown Not the Only Crisis in the World’…
IPS
Catherine Makino Interviews MD. YUNUS, Bangladeshi banker and economist:
TOKYO, Mar 20 (IPS) – Muhammad Yunus, who claimed the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize founding Grameen Bank, which has lent out more than six billion dollars to mostly poor women, says the global recession presents a historical opportunity for change.
IPS Correspondent Catherine Makino caught up with Yunus, considered the guru of microfinance, while he was on a visit to Japan this week.
IPS: How are the poorer countries going to cope with the long economic recession?
Muhammad Yunus: They don’t have any control over the situation because they are the victims. We need to urge the world to fix the mess by using G-20, the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But there isn’t any easy solution.
IPS: Do you think the crisis will get worse?
MY: Maybe it will go deeper and continue to get worse. The first point I would like to bring out is that although this crisis has taken over all the pages of newspapers and all the hours of television, this is not the only crisis in town. There are other crises and we should not forget that. (more…)
Posted on March 20, 2009 - by Gavin
Sub-par but not subprime…
Economist
Lending to the poor has held up well but it is not as safe from the credit crisis as its champions hoped
A GLOBAL credit crisis caused by subprime mortgages is hardly the ideal backdrop for a business making unsecured loans to poor people without a credit history. Yet big microfinance companies, which do exactly that, seem to be in rude health. Mohammad Yunus, the unflappably optimistic founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, a microfinance institution for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, is adamant that business remains unscathed. “We have not been touched in any way by the financial crisis,” he said on a recent visit to Japan. “The simple reason is because we are rooted to the real economy—we are not paper-based, paper-chasing banking. When we give a loan of $100, behind the $100 there are chickens, there are cows. It is not something imaginary.”
He is not alone in thinking that microfinance is insulated from the problems of the global economy. Its proponents argue that any similarity with subprime loans is misleading. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) lend relatively small sums of money to people in developing countries to start small, profitable businesses, not to buy overpriced homes. Many of those businesses serve local needs, which has more merit at a time when exports are collapsing. And microfinance’s reliance on peer pressure for repayment must be the envy of any mainstream banker struggling with rising foreclosures and “jingle mail”; delinquency rates are microscopic. (more…)
Posted on March 18, 2009 - by Gavin
Think Small: A Fix For The Economic Crisis…
Forbes
Nobel winner Muhammad Yunus says microfinance lending to the poor can return the economy to health.
Forget multi-billion-dollar bailouts. Muhammad Yunus thinks the solution to the global financial crisis can be found in loans of much smaller size, backed with more prosaic assets: ducks, chickens, and cows.
The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who founded microfinance pioneer Grameen Bank in 1974, made his name lending tiny sums of money to poor women in his native Bangladesh. To date his bank (the name comes from the Sanskrit word for “village”) has lent out $6 billion, making it one of the world’s top microfinance institutions. Currently 8 million borrowers take out $100 million each month, paying it back 99% of the time.
Contrasted with the subprime loan crisis that helped tank the world economy over the last year, microcredit could be the answer, Yunus told journalists Tuesday at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in Tokyo.
Yunus thinks his model can be extended all over the world, including in developed countries like the U.S. and Japan, where workers are losing their jobs rapidly and where poor credit histories and unemployment mean people can’t get bank accounts or traditional loans. (more…)
Posted on March 13, 2009 - by Gavin
Lending a hand…
World Magazine
Charity: Can microfinancing move beyond the charitable world?
Microcredit is not a new idea. The practice of making small loans for entrepreneurial activities has been around at least since the 19th century. But the idea has taken off in recent years. In 1983, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank was founded explicitly to make microloans. The success of the bank spawned literally thousands of imitators and earned Grameen and its founder, Vanderbilt-educated Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
Grameen’s success notwithstanding, microlending has mostly been seen as charity, a philanthropic activity. Organizations such as Kiva.org have used the internet to match borrowers and lenders. Now, Patrick Fisher and others want to scale the idea by turning microfinance into an asset class.
Fisher, 30, is the founder of Chicago-based Creation Investments. He has an MBA from the Kellogg School, not to mention Bank One and JP Morgan/Chase on his resumé—including tenures in Latin America and China. (He’s fluent in Spanish and describes his Mandarin as “intermediate.”) He has established a fund that makes investments in banks and other organizations that make microloans to poor people in developing countries. (more…)
Posted on February 25, 2009 - by Gavin
MICROCAPITAL STORY: Russian Delegation Visits Grameen Bank of Bangladesh in Efforts to Scale-Up Microfinance Industry and Mitigate Financial Crisis…
Microcapital.org
Bangladeshi news source The Daily Star reported that a high-profile Russian delegation visited the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh to examine how the country regulates its relatively saturated microfinance industry. The delegation observed the operations and legal structure of Grameen Bank in hopes to replicate the structure in Russia. The four-day visit came as Russia explores ways to scale-up its microcredit program to fill a void left by the global financial meltdown. “The global financial crisis has affected many small businesses in Russia while the conventional banks are not willing to finance them for risk involvement in such financing,” said delegation leader and Russian Deputy Minister for Economic Development, Anna Popova, at a joint press conference with Muhammad Yunus in Dhaka City.
MicroCapital has frequently reported on the resilience of the microfinance industry to financial crises and its utility in post-financial crisis recovery. Three particularly relevant MicroCapital articles include two paper wrap-ups, “Fitch Ratings Report: Microfinance – Testing its Resilience to the Global Financial Crisis” and “Microfinance Still Hums, Despite Global Financial Crisis,” and the story “World Bank Sees Microfinance as Strong Asset Class in Midst of Financial Crisis.”
The Russian delegation, comprised of 10 individuals, included senior representatives from the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economic Development, President of National Association of Microfinance Market Stakeholders, senior representatives from the Moscow government and Association of Regional Banks. Beyond meeting high-level bank managers, the Russians took part in a Grameen training program, visiting bank branches and holding discussions with borrowers. A variety of international training programs are offered to the general public via the Grameen Bank website. (more…)
The MiFi Report
-
