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Small change can make a big difference
Small is the new large—at least when it comes to money. That may sound strange, but where billion-dollar loans and foreign aid have failed to defeat poverty, microcredit is winning the war.
Ode Editor-in-Chief Jurriaan Kamp travelled to Kenya, Uganda, Bolivia and India to learn about microcredit from borrowers as well as lenders. What emerges in his book is a bright vision of the future, in which many of the world’s most impoverished people have the ability to obtain small loans and start businesses. Their entrepreneurial ventures—often involving creating and selling handcrafted goods—are usually successful, and borrowers almost always pay their loans back on time. Previously suffering and on the brink of starvation, they now get three meals a day and are able to afford TVs, another set of clothes or comfortable homes for their families.
Once considered a radically risky idea, microcredit has caught on globally. When Bangladeshi economics professor Muhammad Yunus started the trend by founding the Grameen (“village”) Bank in 1976 so he could lend money to townspeople for seeds and livestock, he was widely expected to fail. Twenty-five years later, the bank belongs to 2.4 million poor borrowers, 95 percent of them women. It has dispensed a total of $5.5 billion in small loans averaging $235 each. And Grameen is just one of many microcredit success stories.
Small Change demonstrates that even when it comes to cash, little things can make a big difference.
