Banker to the Poor (8 page)

"Your words frighten us, sir," one woman said hiding her face with the end of her sari.

"Money is something that only my husband handles," said another, turning her back to me so I could not look at her directly.

"Give the loan to my husband. He handles the money. I've never touched any and I don't want to," said a third.

"I wouldn't know what to do with money," said a woman who sat closest to me but averted her eyes.

"No, no, not me. We have no use for money," said an elderly woman. "We have all had enough trouble with dowry payments and we don't want another fight with our husbands. Professor, we just don't want to get into more trouble."

It was easy to see the crushing effects of poverty and abuse in these faces. As they had no power over anyone else, their husbands would vent their frustrations on these women by beating them. In many ways, the women were treated like animals. I knew that marital violence was a terrible problem and understood why none of these women wanted to get involved in an area reserved traditionally for men—the control of cash.

Still, I tried my best to encourage them not to be afraid. "Why not borrow? It would help you to start earning money."

"No, no, no, we cannot take your money."

"Why not? If you invest it, you can earn money and use the profits to feed your children and send them to school."

"No, when my mother died, the last advice she gave me was never to borrow from anybody. So I can't borrow."

"Yes, your mother was a wise woman, she gave you the right advice. But if she were alive today she would advise you to join Grameen. When she was alive, there was no Grameen project. She didn't know anything about this experiment. Back then, there was only one source she could borrow from, the moneylender, and she was advising you rightly not to go to him because he charges 10 percent interest per month or more. But if your mother had known about us, she would definitely have recommended that you join us and make a decent living for yourself."

I had heard their arguments so many times that I had ready answers, but it was difficult to persuade these frightened creatures. They had never interacted with any institution in their lives. Everything that I offered them was strange and threatening. Progress was slow that day. Very slow. As it was slow on many that followed. My students and I tramped around the village all through the monsoon and through the month of Ashar, when people eat lush leafy greens such as
kalmi, puishak
, or
kachu shak
, a sort of long asparagus which acquires a delicate flavor and texture when boiled. My favorite smell came from the delicious
kachu shak
as it simmered with bay leaves, ground cumin, and turmeric in the village.

Very early on in the process of trying to convince women to become Grameen Bank borrowers, we realized that having female bank workers made the job a great deal easier. The process of breaking down fear was always my greatest challenge and it was made easier by the careful work and gentle voices of my female workers. Still, results were slow in coming. At the end of every day, I would debrief my students. Often women workers would come with the names of potential borrowers jotted down on the back of cigarette packs. As a result, I hired three young women to work in our pilot project—Nurjahan Begum and Jannat Quanine, two recent graduates of the university, and Priti Rani Barua, who lived in the Buddhist section of Jobra and had only a ninth-grade education. These female workers found it easier to establish a rapport with women in the villages than their male counterparts, but they also faced many obstacles. Indeed, our fight against the ill treatment and segregation of women took place not only on behalf of our borrowers but also on behalf of our own female employees.

The nature of a bank worker's job requires that he or she walk alone in rural areas, sometimes for distances as long as five miles in each direction. The parents of many prospective female bank workers found this demeaning—even scandalous. Though they might have allowed their daughter to sit behind an office desk, they did not accept her spending her day working in the villages for Grameen. How could the female bank workers get from place to place? Men can ride bicycles in Bangladesh, but it is often considered improper for women to do so. We bought training bikes and held classes to make our women workers confident bike riders. But in some places, the locals would attack them for riding bicycles. Though the villagers would permit women to ride in bullock carts, baby taxis, rickshaws, or even motorbikes, the religious conservatives could not accept a woman on a bike. Even today, twenty-five years later, when 94 percent of our borrowers are women, our female employees still face hostility and discrimination on a regular basis in the villages where they work. When a female bank worker visits a village for the first time, it is not uncommon for crowds to gather and observe her. She often faces criticism from the villagers who were not used to seeing women anywhere but in the home.

We usually tried to recruit our women workers when they had just finished their studies and were either waiting to be married or were married with an unemployed husband. Generally, for an unmarried woman, being employed immediately removed some of the family pressure to get married. In addition, having a job increases her marriage prospects dramatically. She is no longer seen as a burden.

Retaining female bank workers has proven very difficult. Typically, if a female Grameen bank worker gets married, her in-laws exert pressure on her to quit her job. They do not want a "decent" young woman walking alone around villages. They also worry that she might not be able to defend herself in case of trouble. After her first child, the pressure grows for the female bank worker to quit her job. And then after the second or third child, the woman often wants to spend more time at home with her children. And the miles of walking that she did as a young woman are not as easy for her. When we announced our pension program in 1994, which included an early retirement option, we were saddened though not too surprised that many of our female employees opted to leave Grameen. Often we are criticized in international conferences for not employing enough women. I believe that most of those who attack us do not understand the social reality of Bangladesh, but I admit that their criticisms have encouraged us to redouble our efforts and devise new ways to retain female employees. In fact, in 1997 we celebrated the promotion of one woman to the position of zonal manager, the most senior field-based position in Grameen. But the loss of many rank-and-file female employees through retirement since 1994 has been disheartening.

The story of Nurjahan illustrates many of the pressures on our young female workers. Nurjahan was a graduate student at Chittagong University when we started our Grameen experiment. She was twenty-three and studying to get her master's degree with honors in Bengali literature. She had lost her father when she was eleven. She came from a conservative middle-class family and her mother wanted her to marry and have children. But after she completed her studies, Nurjahan rebelled. She was the first woman in her village to receive a master's degree, and she was proud of a job offer she received from a nongovernmental organization (NGO). She begged her mother to allow her to work. But her mother refused, arguing that girls of good families in Bangladesh are not supposed to work at all. Nurjahan's brother was willing to let her work for the NGO, but he was concerned about what others in the village would say. So Nurjahan kept delaying her starting date. The NGO postponed the date three times, but finally could not wait any longer, and she lost the job offer.

When Grameen offered Nurjahan a job, her mother and brothers finally relented. Nurjahan did not tell them that she would have no office and no desk and that she would spend her days walking through the poorest areas of the poorest villages, talking to beggars and destitute women. She knew they would be horrified and would force her to quit. She began working with us in October 1977. And for as long as her family did not know what Grameen was like, they grudgingly allowed her to work.

On her first day, I asked Nurjahan to do a case study of Ammajan Amina, a poor woman of Jobra village who had no means of subsistence. I did this for three reasons. First, I believe that the best way to inspire a new worker is to let her see firsthand the real-life problems of the poor. I wanted Nurjahan to have her heart touched by the reality of poverty. Second, I wanted to see how Nurjahan would cope. It is not easy to work with the poor and to do so in a way that will positively affect their lives. Nurjahan's master's degree did not ensure that she possessed the inner motivation, confidence, and strength to show these people how to overcome obstacles. Would she be willing to spend time with the destitute? To learn how they live, work, and survive? She had to learn to view her clients as total human beings in need of help and change. She had to establish an easy and fear-free interaction with the poor and find out everything there was to know about her borrowers' lives and difficulties. Thus, on Nurjahan's first day, I pulled her aside and said, "Try to speak with Ammajan Amina alone. Try to touch her and to understand her mentality. Today, go there with no pen and no paper in order to gain her confidence."

Nurjahan went to Jobra with my colleague Assaduzzaman ("Assad" for short). Nodding toward Assad, Ammajan Amina asked Nurjahan, "Is he your husband?"

"No," Nurjahan answered, "he is just a colleague."

"Why are you coming to see us with a man who is not your husband?" asked Ammajan Amina. This seemed to be in conflict with the practice of
purdah
and made her suspicious of Nurjahan.

But little by little, day after day, Nurjahan won over Amina's confidence. Amina shared her past with Nurjahan. Of Amina's six children, four had died of hunger or disease. Only two daughters survived. Her husband, much older than she, was quite ill. For several years, he had spent most of the family assets on medicines. After his death, all that Amina had left was the house. She was in her forties, old by Bangladesh standards where, contrary to the world norm, women have a lower life expectancy than men. She was illiterate and had never earned an income before. She tried selling homemade cakes and cookies door to door without much success. Her in-laws tried to expel her and the children from the house where she had lived for twenty years, but she refused to leave.

One day Amina returned and found her brother-in-law had sold her tin roof, and the buyer was now busy removing it. Now the rainy season started, and Amina was cold, hungry, and too poor to make food to sell. As she had no roof to protect her house, the monsoon destroyed her mud walls. She used all she had to feed her own children. Because she was a proud woman, she only begged in nearby villages. One day when she returned she found her house had collapsed, and she started screaming, "Where is my daughter? Where is my baby?"

She found her older child dead under the rubble of her house.

When Nurjahan first met with her in 1976, Ammajan Amina held her only surviving child in her arms. She was heartbroken and desperate. There was no question of any moneylender, much less a commercial bank, giving her credit. But with Grameen loans she bought bamboo to make baskets. Amina remained a borrower to the end of her days. Now her daughter is a member of Grameen.

Through her experience with Amina and many such fragile cases, it became clear to me that Nurjahan had a special gift for dealing with the poor. I was very pleased to have her on my team of workers. Then one day Nurjahan's sister-in-law's brother came to give Nurjahan some family news. When he arrived at our office, he saw that it was only a tin-roofed shack with no telephone, toilet, or running water. He was shocked. This was not at all the image he had of a commercial bank. The office manager, Assad, told Nurjahan's in-law that she was out in the field. The man went and found Nurjahan seated on the grass under a tree talking to some village women. He was astonished. Nurjahan was so embarrassed that she lied and told him that that day was a special situation and begged him not to tell her mother what he had seen. But he did.

At first, Nurjahan's mother was furious. Like most conservative Bengali Muslims, she felt that her daughter should hide indoors, observing the custom of
purdah
. She could not imagine Nurjahan working under the open sky or that such work was decent and becoming to a respectable woman. But eventually, once Nurjahan told her mother the truth and explained her deep desire to help the poor, her mother relented. Today, she is a big supporter of Grameen.

One day I asked Nurjahan to make a presentation about Grameen at a cultural festival. She was to travel to the town of Comilla with two junior female bank workers, and because the trip from Chittagong to Comilla is not dangerous, I did not make any provision for a male colleague to accompany them. This was not insensitive on my part. I felt that my workers ought to fend for themselves. Also, I knew that Grameen needed to break the myth that a woman could not travel alone on a short trip.

Though she did not show it, Nurjahan was furious with me for not placing her in the care of a man who would arrange the travel plans and take care of all the details of the road. She even telephoned a male colleague and asked him to accompany her, but he was busy. As she had never traveled alone before, she prayed to Allah to give her strength and courage, and away she went. The show in Comilla was a great success.

Now Nurjahan travels everywhere she pleases without difficulty. She is one of the three general managers of the Grameen Bank and heads our training division, where she helps hundreds of our future young bank workers to become self-reliant.

In the fall of 1977, on the first anniversary of our rural banking experiment, I joined my family in Chittagong for the holy festival of Eid-ul Fitr, which celebrates the end of the monthlong fast of Ramadan. Though Eid-ul Fitr is a three-day holiday, like most Bengali families we take a week to celebrate it. My mother and father, both extremely religious, instilled a deep respect for tradition in their children. My father spends the entire Ramadan paying the religious tax (
Jakat
) required by the Quran. As prescribed by Shariah law, he gives first to family relatives who are in need, then to poor neighbors, and finally to the poor at large.

Eid-ul Fitr is our opportunity to gather together relatives and reflect on the year that has elapsed. In 1977, we congregated at Niribili, the house my father built in 1959 in the then-new Pachlaish residential area of Chittagong.
Niribili
means peace and quiet. The house rises behind a protective garden wall, surrounded by a ring of lush green trees: mango, betel nut, banana, teak, guava, coconut, and grenadine. Niribili is huge. With its vast verandahs and wide-open spaces, I have always felt that it resembles a transatlantic steamer. Despite its constructional oddities—the rooms are too big, the hallways too lavish and impractical—I love the place. It is divided into eight separate apartments, which house my brothers, so that my father, who lives on the ground floor, is surrounded by half of his large, loving brew. That is the way he likes it. The house is a source of family strength and unity.

On the day of Eid, our family's ritual is fixed according to custom. We rise early and wash. Then we visit Batua, my father's ancestral village, where I was born and where the family spent most of the Second World War. At 7 a.m. the men of the family head for the Eidgah, an open field where a large congregation gathers for prayer. We say our
namaz
(prayer) and the imam begins his
Khutbah
(sermon). Several thousand people line up behind him. Everyone is dressed in new Eid clothes and the smell of traditional perfumes fills the open field. After prayer my brothers and I embrace each other, saying, "Eid Mubarak" ("Happy Eid") and line up to touch Father's feet as a mark of respect and greeting. After a visit to the cemetery and the payment of the compulsory
fitra
tax (1.25 kilos of wheat to the poor), we begin our round of visits to relatives' houses. After our monthlong fast, the sweetmeats and delicious noodle dishes taste all the better.

Mumtaz, our elder sister, prepares the best sweets of all. This year she has made my favorites: creamy
rashomalai,
with tiny white poppy seeds and a rich mango pulp mixed into
kheer,
a sort of thick evaporated milk. I savor her yogurt and
chira
, delicious rice flakes, complemented by sweet mangoes and bananas.

Mumtaz is twelve years older than I. She has an oval face with warm dark eyes. Though she married and left the house at seventeen, she always made it her business to oversee her siblings as if she were a substitute mother. This Eid-ul Fitr of 1977, children were all around us, calling out to each other, laughing, eating, and playing. But Mumtaz quietly took my hands in hers. How good she is! How caring and loving she has been to me, to all of us! As I look into her eyes, I recall the day in 1950 when I raced by bus and rickshaw all the way to her house to announce the birth of my brother Ayub. How out of breath I was, how excited at ten. She laughed and embraced me and called her neighbors to tell them the good news. We ate and celebrated long into the night, and the next day Mumtaz packed her bag and moved into our house to help Mother take care of little Ayub. So much time had passed since then. Looking around the room at my sisters Mumtaz and Tunu and my brothers Salam, Ibrahim, Jahangir, Ayub, Azam, and Moinu, I thanked God for our health and happiness. How lucky we were.

In October 1977, on a trip to the capital city of Dhaka, I had a chance meeting that radically changed our efforts to bring credit to the poor villagers of Jobra. For personal reasons that had nothing to do with Grameen, I was in the offices of one of our largest national banks, the Bangladesh Krishi ("Agriculture") Bank (BKB), where I bumped into an acquaintance of mine, the managing director. As soon as he saw me, Mr. A. M. Anisuzzaman, an extremely talkative and outgoing man, launched into a tirade, a long monologue attacking me and other academics who were not doing enough for Bangladesh but hiding away in our ivory towers. It was a blistering attack:

"You academics are failing us. You are failing in your social duties. And the banking system of this country stinks. It is all corruption and embezzlement and filth. Millions of taka are stolen every year from the BKB bank without any trace. No one is accountable to anyone for anything. Certainly not you lily-white–handed academics with your cushy jobs and your jaunts abroad. You are useless all of you. Utterly useless! I am absolutely disgusted by what I see in this society. No one thinks of the poor. I tell you this country is a disgrace, and it deserves all the problems it has."

Anisuzzaman went on and on. When at last he began to slow down, I said, "Well, sir, I am happy to hear you say all this because I just happen to have a proposal that may interest you."

I proceeded to outline my Jobra experiment, explaining that my students were volunteering on an unsalaried basis. "They donate their time and I use the budget for my practical training to pay for expenses. The loans are being repaid and the situation of our borrowers is improving by the day. But I do worry about my students. They need to be compensated, even in a small way, for doing this work. The entire experiment is held together only by a thread. It needs institutional support."

Anisuzzaman listened carefully to my story. As I spoke, I saw him drawn to my idea. He was getting excited.

"What problems have you had with the Janata Bank?" he asked.

"They insist that I guarantee each and every loan. I will be in America for three months, attending UN General Assembly sessions, and they will insist on mailing the loan documents for me to sign. You can imagine how impractical that is!"

He shook his head. "Tell me what I can do to help you."

I was delighted. I could have gone on for years and years and never have run across such an eager supporter. I explained, "The Janata Bank can't raise objections to our program because there has been no loan default. But it takes them anywhere from two to six months to process each new loan. Every single one has to be sanctioned by the head office in Dhaka. And every time they have a question, it takes a few more months to go up the chain of command and come back again. It is difficult to operate like this."

Anisuzzaman waved his hand impatiently. "You can't go on like this. It is absurd. Now tell me what you would want from me?"

"From the Krishi Bank?"

"Yes."

"Well." My mind was racing. "I guess I would like the Agriculture Bank to set up a branch in Jobra and leave it at my disposal. I would frame its rules and procedures and recruit my own staff. And you would allow me to grant loans up to a total of 1 million taka. Give me a 1 million taka limit, give me one year, then close the lid and let me go to work. A year later, open the lid and see if I am still alive. If you like just one thing I have done, extend the program. If not, simply close down the branch and forget about it. Use me as an experiment. If no one repays any of our loans, then at most you have lost 1 million taka."

"Fine," said Anisuzzaman. He picked up the telephone and said to his secretary, "Get me the manager of the Chittagong District. He covered the receiver and asked, "When are you going back to Chittagong?"

"Tomorrow."

"By the afternoon plane?"

"Yes."

Another voice sounded on the line and Anisuzzaman said, "My friend, Professor Yunus, is flying back from Dhaka tomorrow. He will arrive at the university campus at 5
P.M
. I want you to be waiting for him at his residence, and I want you to take orders from him. Whatever he says, whatever he wants, those are orders from me. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Have you any questions?" Anisuzzaman said into the telephone.

"No, sir."

"Perfect. Now I don't want to hear anything going wrong. I don't want Professor Yunus complaining to my office that his orders are not being followed. Do you understand?"

As I came out of Anisuzzaman's office, my head still swimming, I saw a girl sweeping the street outside. She was extremely thin, barefoot, and wore a ring in her nose. Like the thousands of cleaners in Dhaka's streets, this woman would work all day long, seven days a week, and would just barely earn enough to subsist. Yet she was one of the "lucky ones," for she had a job. It was for this very woman, and for all those women who could not even aspire to a job of street cleaner, that I wanted to develop my credit program. At that moment, I knew that I was doing the right thing.

The next afternoon, the Chittagong regional manager of the Agriculture Bank, was waiting for me in my drawing room. He seemed very nervous. I told him what had happened the day before and how enthusiastically Anisuzzaman had embraced the work my students and I were doing in Jobra. The manager explained that I would need to write a project proposal. He would bring several of his colleagues to my house to draft a formal written request for funding.

The following Monday, five people showed up at my home. They asked me a million questions, things I had never thought about: How many borrowers did I want? How many employees? What salary levels would I offer? How many safes would I need? I answered the questions the best I could. A few weeks later I received a large envelope in the mail. It was a proposal based on what I had told them I wanted to do, a long complicated thick tome, full of bureaucratic jargon. Even reading a single page was extremely difficult. It said nothing. I took out a pen and jotted down my original idea in my own words. My proposal was to the point. The first thing I changed was the name of the branch. I wrote:

Krishi Bank uses the term "agriculture" in its title. I do not want this branch to be about agriculture. Farmers are not the poorest people in Bangladesh. On the contrary, those who own farms are relatively well off compared to the destitute landless who make a living by selling labor. I want this branch to cover all sorts of rural employment, such as trading, small manufacturing, retailing, even selling door to door. I want this to be a rural bank, not a bank merely concerned with crops and farms. So I choose the word "Grameen."
*

 

Several months went by before I heard from Anisuzzaman. He called me in for a meeting in his office in Dhaka. Once I had seated myself, he lit a cigarette and considered me carefully.

"My board of directors say that I have no authority to do what I am trying to do," he said. "I can't delegate my banking authority to you because you are an outsider, not an employee of the bank." Anisuzzaman paused to frame his question. "Yunus, do you really want to open a new branch of our bank?"

"No, not at all. I just want to lend money to the poor," I answered.

"Do you want to remain a professor?"

"Well, teaching is the only thing I know how to do. It's what I love."

"I am not pressuring you. I was only thinking out loud." Anisuzzaman leaned his head back and blew smoke up to the ceiling. "You could give up your job at the university and simply become an employee of our bank. That would make it easy for me to make you my deputy. I could then delegate any of my powers to you without fear of complaints from the board."

"Thank you, but I have no real interest in becoming a banker," I answered. "I would rather remain a professor. I have a department to run, students and professors to oversee, university politics to contend with. I am doing this poverty alleviation work with my left hand, as it were. I would far rather name one of my students to be the manager of the branch."

Anisuzzaman stared out the window of his office, letting the smoke curl from his cigarette. I could see his mind toying with various ideas. "What if I do not make you responsible for the branch on paper. Officially, the district manager would oversee the branch, but unofficially he would do everything you tell him. He would take his orders from you. And if there were anything out of the ordinary, he would come to headquarters, and I would approve it. You should submit a list of your students who are currently working for you in Jobra. One of them can become the branch manager and the others can become regular employees of the bank."

I smiled at the thought that my associates—Assad, Nurjahan, and Jannat—would finally have solid, paying jobs for the first time in their lives. "I would call it the Grameen Branch," I said.

Anisuzzaman nodded, "The Experimental Grameen Branch of the Agriculture Bank. How does that sound?"

"Perfect."

We were both smiling now. He got up. We stood by the window. Outside, the chaos of the city streamed by. I saw barefoot beggars with babies, women asleep on the sidewalk, children with deformed limbs and emaciated bodies.

"The urban poor are another problem," Anisuzzaman said with a loud sigh.

"If we alleviate suffering in the countryside, that will reduce the pressure on the poor to rush to Dhaka and clog the streets," I said.

He nodded slowly. "Good luck, Professor."

I immediately threw myself into my work. Still a full-time professor at the university, I devoted much of my day to managing our Jobra branch of the Agriculture Bank, which was still staffed by my ex-students. We could work faster than with the Janata Bank, and I no longer needed to guarantee each loan personally, but we still had fewer than five hundred borrowers. Though there were many individual successes, we did not seem to be making much of a dent in the chronic poverty of the villages.