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Shvoong Home>Law & Politics>A RECIPE FOR PEACE AND DEVELOPMENT Summary

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A RECIPE FOR PEACE AND DEVELOPMENT

Article Abstract by: Pat4peace    

Original Author: Agbedejobi patrick niyi

         Want to know how bad are things in Nigeria? Ask the female traditional
cloth-dyer in Abeokuta seeking for N3,000 to expand her business. Or cane-weaver in Calabar in earnest need of N5,000 to purchase larger bundles of cane to meet rising demand. Meager as these monies are, these lowly traders depend on it to keep them off the streets.
Believe it or not the incidence of poverty across Nigeria is overwhelming. Were it not for this gripping phenomenon, the nation’s on-going economic reforms would have been remarkable. Extreme poverty is the most serious problem in Nigeria and other parts today because it is the root of many other problems. HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, the Niger Delta crisis, environmental degradation, illiteracy, malnutrition, human rights abuses, human trafficking, narcotics trafficking, illegal immigration, ideological intolerance, tyranny, debt, slavery and so on – have their roots in this seminal evil.
Regrettably, over the past decades vast resources have been deployed in the fight against poverty, with generally mediocre results. Yet one man has proven that instituting a workable microcredit system for the poor is a sure way to fight poverty: Mohammed Yunus.
Widely referred to as the inventor of the microcredit movement, the Bangladeshi economics professor and the Grameen Bank he founded was yesterday named winners of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize for advancing economic and social opportunities for the poor, especially women, through their pioneering microcredit work. Over the last three decades, Yunus has demonstrated that turning conventional banking on its head will accomplish a world of good for millions of impoverished people. Imagine a bank that loans money based on a borrower’s desperate circumstances - where, as Yunus says, “the less you have, the higher priority you have.”
      What began as a modest academic experiment has become a personal crusade to end poverty. Yunus’s novel idea of dishing out microcredit to the poor came while chatting with a shy woman weaving bamboo stools with calloused fingers in his native Bangladesh. Sufia Begum was a 21-year-old villager and mother of three when the economics professor met her in 1974 and asked her how much she earned. She replied that she borrowed five taka (about N130) from a middleman for the bamboo for each stool. Almost that entire loan went back to the lender. “I thought to myself, my God, for five taka she has become a slave,” Yunus said in an interview. “I couldn’t understand how she could be so poor when she was making such beautiful things.” The following day, he and his students did a survey in the woman’s village, Jobra, and discovered that 43 of the villagers owed a total of 856 taka (about N3,500). “I couldn’t take it anymore. I put the 856 taka out there and told them they could liberate themselves,” he said,” and pay him back whenever they could. The idea was to buy their own materials and cut out the middleman.
Interestingly, they all paid him back, day by day, over a year, and his momentary generosity grew into a full-fledged concept that came to fruition in 1976 when he began to set up experimental microfinance projects in rural parts of Bangladesh until he formally established Grameen Bank in 1983. As the bank’s founder, his ideas have changed the face of rural economic and social development forever. In the years since, the bank says it has loaned 290.03 billion taka (about N4.7 trillion) to more than six million Bangladeshis.
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Published: May 04, 2007
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