The Girl Effect
Learned of this message worth spreading from patlaw. Watch the video below and check out the site The Girl Effect.
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One of the ways to help women living in poverty is microfinance.
One of the biggest advocates of microfinance is Muhammad Yunus who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
The New Yorker has a pretty good article on microfinance here.
“There was a woman who started out with a mud hut,” McKinley recalled. “When we came back, she had a three-room house with a cement floor, and the pigs were in the hut she had stayed in before.” When the women first came for loans, “they sat hunched, looking down into their laps. They would take the money and fold it into a hairpin behind their ears, looking so frightened—because, they said, they were afraid they couldn’t pay it back. Two or three years later, these same women were running businesses, and were often involved in politics in their village.” She continued, “Does everyone succeed? No. But it is the same in the investment business. You don’t want to take a lot of risk? Buy some ducks. But the more risk-taking borrowers will pool their loans and buy a baby water buffalo and rent it to men for farming. And then there are those who blow right past livestock and build a brick factory.”
Omidyar was struck by Yunus’s statement that the poor are natural entrepreneurs, essentially because their business activities are a matter of survival. “By giving them the tools, you unleash the entrepreneurial instinct,” Omidyar told me. Janet McKinley said, “All these wealthy entrepreneurs loved it, because they say, ‘This woman is an entrepreneur—just smaller scale.’ ”
For a counter-view on microfinance, read this other article on the New Yorker.
