THE TRAGIC LOCAL IGNORANCE OF GLOBAL ECONOMISTS

The standard theories of the majority of economics journalists and academics are now known to have been anything but transparently on the side of human beings for over a decade. http://transparency.tv  Even so, the nonsense these noisy people propagate in mass media and academic journals on Bangladeshi microcredit impacts way beyond the normal dismal consequences that richer nations have until recently been accustomed to.

There are a lot of international implementations that claim to be inspired by Bangladeshi microcredit but which break fundamental rules integral to the Bangladeshi franchise systems. Such false imitations of microcredit merit fierce and open criticism. Conversely as Bill Clinton has bravely pointed out- the 3 major Bangladeshi microcredit systems are generating the majority of its developing economy. The local story is almost miraculous and shows what compound whole truth of purpose can do and network from one community to the next.

Bangladesh is the nation which started as the world’s poorest when born to independence just over a third of a century ago. Thanks to microcredit systems Bangladesh has been sustaining growth over decades and it is irrefutably a world leader in achieving local millennium goals. As if this wasn’t good enough reason for humanity in a social networking age to need to relate to simple microeconomics truths of Bangladesh’s free market to end poverty, it turns out that the Bangladesh microcredit systems provide unique clues –as well as a national history of social business entrepreneurial maps - on how to resolve the main fallibilities that are causing the global banking system to crash in ever more viciously expensive ways.

BANGLADESH ’S MICROCREDIT 1-2-3

The 3 main Bangladesh microcredit systems serve wholly different segments. That means they are best in kind at what they do, but it is mathematical illiteracy to make competitive comparisons between them or tabulate international mixes. It is also the case that at least two of the three systems are as much lifelong collaboration entrepreneur clubs that members are invited to communally join as they are “banks” –at least in the western meaning of this word

For about 14 years, from 1976, Grameen pioneered the only major microcredit system. Its service offer was designed for some of the poorest and most abused women on the planet. Join the Grameen club and we will empower you to become independent income generators; you will have peer to peer support structures both for becoming businesswomen and supporting your choice of what community safety and future sustainability priorities are needed. Where innovative solutions are required on life-critical needs, Grameen’s entrepreneurs will develop community-wide solutions. The whole organization will be owned equally by the poorest members.  The way to join Grameen involves taking out typically a small loan to start up your income generation for weekly repayment over a year, but your friendly bankers will demand no collateral, no legal contracts. They trust your own ability, and the whole community support system that is Grameen’s responsibility for designing simply and effectively. Before Grameen was granted an unique constitution to operate a rural bank in 1983, it had already surveyed emerging members on goals that they defined as ending poverty communally over a generation. 16 decisions to do with education of children, basic health and safety  became the moral contract between members and Grameen’s leadership purpose.

To this day, the 16 decisions explain the Grameen culture of never being satisfied with the managers of each and every one of its 2000+ branches unless that operation positively discriminates towards including the poorest in its reach. And there are now over 25 services beyond the original microloans that Grameen’s entirety as a service network integrates round social business models. All social businesses are defined to be owned by the membership.  As businesses they are designed to sustain positive cashflow. However the surplus is reinvested back in the purpose of the business or its replication so that its distribution ultimately reaches every community where it can make a difference to members and their childrens’ lives.

 If you ask Dr Yunus about ending poverty, he will say loans for income generation are a human right but microcredit’s hi-trust relationship networking also opens the door to generating all micro-services of life-critical importance. 33 years after the first microcredit experiments, Grameen is a living laboratory of health and safety, education, media and energy innovations unlike any bank a westerner will have met. Consider just 4 of Grameen’s social business threads – two which emerged as locally critical early on, two that are the cause of entrepreneurial revolutions http://erworld.tv  of worldwide import as their sustainability exponentials have compounded since 1996

1 Early on Grameen became the largest seed distributor in Bangladesh . Why because Dr Yunus’ staff noted that village children had night blindness. They were told this was because of vitamin deficiency which Grameen’s members could cure if they planted carrots. So Grameen sold the tiniest and so lowest unit cost packs of seeds ever marketed!

2 Grameen’s rule is that credit is for either income generation or a life-critical purchase not superficial consumption. Within years of its constitution, Grameen won an Aga Khan award for architecture. The story of Grameen’s entry into sub sub prime is this. The government was issuing house-building aid to so-called poor people. However its definition of houses were far too expensive for rural villagers. What these families needed was the minimum design of monsoon-proof roof over their head and a pit latrine. Grameen developed the lowest-cost structural design and a credit policy for paying back the cost of the house in under 5 years. In line with the 16 decisions, it also insisted that to qualify for a loan the property right had to be turned over to the woman. Prior to this a man only had to tell his wife she was divorced and she had to leave forthwith. Now if the man in the household did that, he had to leave! Grameen members have successfully completed quarter of a million sub sub prime mortgages without one foreclosure.

3 1996 saw the start up of  2 most visionary community entrepreneur investments ever made by and for poor people – the now famous mobile telephone lady and the as yet little known fact that Grameen members now install more solar units than the whole of the USA. Prior to 1996 Grameen had evolved round nearly 100,000 village centres (meeting places owned by the women) where up to 60 members met. Their knowhow was only connected as far as cross-fertilization of grameen’s service employees could manage. Once every village had a shared mobile phone – an intervention which must have been  as revolutionary as a telegram office in the wild west of the 19^th century – vital information started to be networked all across 100,000 hubs. Moreover Grameen and partners picked up the mobile franchise at cents in the dollar as global consultants were an order of magnitude out in predicting the market size of mobile phones in what they analysed as the world’s poorest nation. Today, Grameen Phone is the largest corporate tax payer in the nation and the Grameen share is owned by its 7 million women entrepreneurs. In the case of Grameen renewable energy http://www.gshakti.org , the plan is to create 100000 green jobs in the villages by 2012, as well as to demonstrate how any sunshine state can develop a thriving carbon-negative economy. This is most important to Bangladesh as the first 100+ million nation likely to be washed away if our global policies continue to melt the world’s ice and raise sea levels 

2 BRAC spent most of Bangladesh ’s first 2 decades developing healthcare and primary education services. Alongside this it started developing at least 3 industry sectors to be owned bottom-up by the poorest women : poultry, other livestock, silk farming and fashions. When BRAC started microcredit around 1990, we can well imagine its main focus was to empower individuals to start up businesses which contributed to these industry sectors. Unlike Grameen, BRAC’s constitution was not restricted to village banking. Its own use of information technology has always been at the infrastructure level first as opposed to Grameen’s delivery to end users in the community. Thus BRAC became a leader in automating banking transactions. It now runs a for-profit city banking chain alongside its microcredit to end rural poverty

3 ASA has also existed as a social services network since the 1970s but around 1990 it entered and then focused entirely on microbanking. Unlike Grameen or BRAC, it does not itself design entrepreneurial franchises beyond pure financial services. It is primarily banking for those among the individual poor who after 20 years of communally operated microcredit now want to be served individually without the need of peer support groups or village-wide goals. Potentially, ASA is the nearest system design the West may compare to what Main Street might want from local banks on the side of investing in the productivity of the customer as well as the hi-trust community-building which families need invested in.

This brief review does not begin to indicate the worldwide potential for sustainability  investment understanding which Bangladesh microcredit models are now interacting with our digital age. For example, India and Bangladesh are teaming up to develop the next generation of mobile microbanking http://bankabillion.org so that the costs of basic banking become 10 times less to operate. Kenya ’s leading microcredit http://jamiibora.org was born after the age of mobile connectivity. In under a decade its 300000 members (doubling almost annually) have become the world’s leading example of microcredit that empowers job creation among slum youth as well as rural women. The Oscar-winning moving slumdog millionaire doesn’t begin to tell how exciting Jamii Bora's story and contribution to ending poverty can be.

Other microcredit channels that have a long reputation of being both transparent measurers and bottom-up agencies are now hi-trust networking’s perfect partners for co-creating free markets with mobiles. http://microenergycredits.com forms partnerships between local microcredits and small scale solar suppliers; by aggregating how many households can verifiably be identified as zero-carbon users, carbon credit markets can return the value to the poorest who make the changeover to renewable energy. MEC is determined to make a clean energy market between 250 million households worldwide in time to celebrate other 2015 millennium goals. CEO leaders networks clustered around John Mackey are celebrating sustainable capitalism’s development of fair trade partnerships with the support of local microcredits http://wholeplanetfoundation.org    (See also the new book - Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the Worlds Problems (Hardcover) by Michael Strong , John Mackey )

INDUSTRY SECTOR RESPONSIBILITY

Dr Yunus’s own new book “Creating a world without poverty –Social Business, Future of Capitalism” reviews the third of a century through which Bangladesh became the most collaborative innovator and economic social business networker. Since winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr Yunus has upped the challenge. How about playing Future Capitalism games and all types of media celebrating them more tham March Madness or four-yearly Olympics? The first FC game involves heroic innovation partnerships matching the world’s most resourced organizations and deepest grassroots networks. The search is on for service solutions to the most life-critical needs which an industry sector is uniquely capable of. Why would a global corporation spend a billion dollars on image-making campaigns when it faces this outstanding media opportunity reality-making? Worldwide youth and free markets of ending poverty can now celebrate a global company’s reputation gain for helping innovate the most responsible innovation its sector can create, while the poorest own the social business so that sustainable surpluses are invested back in replicating a life-saving solution. About 20 such goodwill multiplying partnerships have begun during the first year of Dr Yunus launching the challenge of Future Capitalism partnering http://www.yunuspartners.com  

Yes this generation can make and celebrate our networking space race as that of ending poverty. We will need to replace historically backward looking economics analysts by true future capitalism reporters. These will typically be youthful visitors of local contexts of grassroots microcredit.  Those whose peers share the love of mapping how sustainable microeconomics win-win-wins and how social business networks multiply exponentials up over longer periods of time than the quarterised MBA mindsets know. Help us log up a 1000 replicable social business franchises at http://socialbusiness.tv ; join in demanding an annual yearbook on Future Capitalism edited out of Dhaka as world’s number 1 sustainability investment city.  RSVP info@worldcitizen.tv with a more exciting way of seeing what future generation investment in people instead of yesterday’s machines can truly credit.

The world of 2009 has been described by President Obama as one in which global top-down has been proven not to work. Microeconomists and entrepreneurial revolutionaries have  33 years of experiments in choosing another way that are waiting to be open sourced worldwide. This is in all probability the year we breach irreversibility’s tipping point - if we fail to unite in valuing how to prevent a decade-long slump and potential loss of human sustainability. To microeconomists evidence of the need for a new capitalism has been compounding since 1976- not just in the practice of Dr Yunus -and 200000 plus sustainability investment microbankers of Bangladesh - but in the surveys of Entrepreneurial Revolution published from the Christmas 1976 issue of The Economist. When a networking generation wants to integrate more value than zero-sum globalization, the entrepreneurial “must” is to go micro and then open source solutions that microentrpreneurially work-  replicating them anywhere that societies want to test them transparently.

Future Capitalism - Yes We Can Unite in Do This Now

http://muhammadyunus.org/content/view/194/128/lang,en/  .  What John Lennon could only imagine, President Obama is uniquely qualified to help action as a son of microcredit, and with his fatherland of Kenya Jamii Bora providing a template which in Africa ’s context can value multiply even more job creation than Grameen. Do we not owe Dr Yunus’ and the Bangladesh nation’s open invitation to end poverty the human values of whole hearted networking transparency and true grassroots empowerment? Wouldn’t it be far less wasteful than bailing out (so far 13 trillion dollars of ) big banking and insurance systems whose global mis-economy has already overshot the claim –let alone humanity’s credit - of being too big to fail?