Poor need infotech: Mohd Yunus

HONG KONG: The click-click of countless camera shutters resonates around the room in Hong Kong as the “Professor”, in a natty white kurta-pyjama and grey overcoat, ambles in, smiling genially. “I’ve been to Hong Kong about 15 times,” he says, as strobes of flashlights go off in waves. 

 

“But surely there can’t always have been so many cameras,” I venture. “No,” he responds with a guffaw. With this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, Prof Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded 30 years ago have gained vastly enhanced visibility, and he’s now using that to take his “poverty alleviation” message out to newer and newer audiences. He was in Hong Kong to address participants at the ITU Telecom World 2006 event, and to use that platform to encourage some of the biggest names in the global telecommunications space to harness information technology (IT) to empower the poor and help alleviate poverty. 

 

The subject of poverty gets Yunus all worked up, and his geniality vanishes instantly. “Poor people don’t get an opportunity to break out of poverty because facilities aren’t available around them,” he says. “We have banks, they don’t. We subject them to all kinds of disadvantages and then we pity them for being poor, but in fact, we should be pitying ourselves — because we monopolise all these facilities,” he says, cuttingly. 

 

“Even the poorest people have unlimited capacity and creativity within them,” says Yunus. “But there aren’t facilities and opportunities to open it up and unleash it. And from our experience, one way for people to unwrap the package that they carry is for them to have some money in their hands so they can use their talent and start some creative activity to generate an income.”

 

It was in such a context, he recalls, that he founded the Grameen Bank – to bring financial services to Bangladesh’s poor by setting up a banking system that doesn’t rely on collateral. That microcredit model has now gained worldwide acceptance as a powerful weapon in the aid of poverty alleviation.

 

Today, Yunus is pitching the “great synergy” between infotech and microcredit in lifting people out of poverty – and pointing to the business opportunities that lie in catering to the “bottom of the pyramid” market. He recalls that Grameen Phone, a company started up 10 years ago to provide cellphone services for poor people, is today Bangladesh’s biggest cellphone service provider. “Today it has more than 10 million subscribers, and in fact, it’s spilled over into neighbouring Indian villages as well.”     

 

When we partner with companies, says Yunus, “we’re not looking for charity. We’ve lifted the whole issue of poverty alleviation from a charity model to a business model. From end to end, it’s a business with a very important social purpose.” 

 

How is it that a country that, by every conceivable yardstick, is among the world’s poorest has given birth to such a robust social entrepreneurship model – as exemplified by the Grameen Bank?

 

“It’s logical: desperate situations give birth to creative solutions. Bangladesh today has more NGOs than India does – working in the areas of oral rehydration projects to education to rural health for the poor... Given the enormity of the problem, there are few other options for the people.”

 

Does it also reflect a failure of governance? “That’s probably another reason” he says. “You cannot depend on the government alone.”