Role models and true stories of honesty
From 16Guidelines
Mohammad Yunus
Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus based the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh on a belief that people are fundamentally honest. He often states that it’s not people who aren’t credit-worthy – it’s banks that aren’t people-worthy. The aim of the bank is lend money to impoverished people so that they can create a better life for themselves. “Poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums” declared Dr Yunus at the first World Micro-Credit Summit in 1997.
Yunus believes that every human being has unlimited potential. The policies and procedures of the Grameen Bank aim to develop that potential, particularly the quality of honesty. The bank requires no security against a loan, but employs a range of mechanisms to encourage repayment. Borrowers organise themselves into groups, payments are made in small weekly amounts and meetings take place under a village tree. The borrowers are shareholders in the bank. As a result, there is an extraordinarily low default rate - less than 1%.
Yunus says “The meaning of the word ‘credit’ is trust. And yet over the years, as commercial banking has become institutionalised, it has built its entire edifice on the basis of mutual distrust.” Grameen has shown that there is another way. In 1998, after 22 years of business, it had over two million borrowers, 12,000 employees and 1,112 branches. However for Yunus “our success is measured not by bad debt figures or repayment rates…but by whether the miserable and difficult lives of our borrowers have become less miserable, less difficult.3”
Jorimon is one such borrower, whose life has been transformed by the trust shown towards her by the Grameen Bank. “Previously we went hungry for days on end; I worked like a slave in other people’s houses; I walked from village to village with a heavy load of firewood on my head, trying to get some money in return. We had no home of our own. People used to ignore us all the time…But today God has shown us the path to happiness through the bank loan.”
Pilai Poonswad
Biology professor and conservationist Pilai Poonswad is recruiting poachers and illegal loggers to her campaign to save the hornbills of South Thailand from extinction. “Your children will dig up your bones and curse them for what you have done to the forests” she tells them. Pilai has successfully raised the money to protect more than 100 hornbill nests, set up a mobile learning centre with trained educators, and create alternative sources of employment and income for the local people. Ex-poachers now teach current poachers that regeneration will provide a safer future for them and their families rather than destruction and extermination. Pilai’s dream is that these initiatives will foster more research into the complex web of life, and that modern Thais will rediscover what it means to live in harmony with the forest and with each other. In 2006 Pilai Poonswad was made a Laureate of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise for her visionary project.
Julian Cribb, Poachers into Gamekeepers, www.sciencealert.com.au, 28th June 2007.
