Banker to the Poor [antikvár]

AUTHOR'S PREFACE My experience working in the Grameen Bank has given me faith; an unshakeable faith in the creativity of human beings. It leads me to believe that humans are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty. They suffer now as they did in the past because we turn our heads away from this issue. I have come to believe, deeply and firmly, that we can create a poverty-free world, if we want to. I came to this conclusion not as a product of a pious dream, but as a concrete result of experience gained in the work of the Grameen Bank. It is not micro-credit alone which will end poverty. Credit is one door through which people can escape from poverty. Many more doors and windows can be created to facilitate an easy exit. It involves conceptualizing about people differently, it involves designing a new institutional framework consistent with this new conceptualization. Grameen has taught me two things: first, our knowledge base about people and their interactions is still very inadequate; second, each individual person is very important. Each person has tremendous potential. She or he alone can influence the lives of others within the communities, nations, within and beyond her or his own time. Each of us has much more hidden inside us than we have had a chance to explore. Unless we create an environment that enables us to discover the limits of our potential, we will never know what we have inside of us. But it is solely up to us to decide where we want to go. We are the navigators and pilots of this planet. If we take our role seriously, we can reach the destination we seek. I want to tell this story because I want you to figure out what it means to you. If you find the Grameen story credible and appealing, I would like to invite you to join those who believe in the possibility of creating a poverty-free world and have decided to work for it. You may be a revolutionary, a