Grameen bank why women

Rahman, A. Schuler, S. Hashemi, A. Schumacher, E. Sen, A. Sen, G. Sharif, I. Stiglitz, J. Todd, H. Varian, H.

White, S. Wood, G. Yunus, M. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Reprints and Permissions. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 16, — Download citation.

Issue Date : March Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. One of the many successful women I met who had worked her way up to owning chickens. Another had built a new house. Borrowers are required to go to a weekly meeting where they meet with 30 to 40 other women.

At these meetings, they not only make repayments on their loans but also make new friends, get support for their small businesses and learn how to speak up for themselves. While these are impossible goals for many women to accomplish completely, they provide a vision of a better life and a pathway. Critics of microcredit claim too many women become overburdened by debts. Some report stories of women committing suicide because of their debt.

This is because Grameen Bank has centers in thousands of small villages and staffs weekly meetings. But from my research, many more have seen their lives improve.

Yunus himself is outraged by those that make huge profits of the backs of the very poor and this kind of microcredit. There are academics in the USA who insist that the Grameen Bank data announcing success stories is overstated and that their own randomized studies suggest that microcredit does not have much effect on the poverty level.

It is true that Yunus has always had grandiose hopes for microcredit. Initially he believed that in a few years that poverty itself would only be seen in museums. When all is said and done, well-intended microcredit remains one of the best tools available to combat poverty. It is now a worldwide movement with over million poor people receiving small loans.

Yunus and microcredit changed the world by opening up financial services to the poor — who until the advent of microcredit -- had been shunned by banks. Copies may not be duplicated for commercial purposes. The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.

PDF file.