CGF Blog

First Experiences With Bangladesh and Grameen

Monday, January 04, 2010

This photo shows one of the Grameen center meetings

First Impressions of Bangladesh and Grameen Bank

When Jill and I landed in Dhaka on Sunday the city was shrouded in an intense fog that, we later learned, is quite common this time of year. The scene when we walked outside the airport was pretty much what one would expect of a third world capital city: people everywhere; rickshaws competing for space with taxis and buses and all manner of other vehicles, human, animal and fossil-fuel powered; bustling markets; polluted air, etc.

We were taken to the Grand Prince Hotel and then immediately met up with our interpreter, Matin, who accompanied us to Grameen Bank’s head office. Our first adventure took place when Muhaimeen hailed a bicycle rickshaw that, in just three chaotic minutes, brought us to the office. Amazingly, Grameen, a Bank that exists for and is owned by the poor, has a 21 story head office, one of the tallest buildings in the area. One can’t help but feel that Grameen is a kind of conglomerate for good: leveraging all the ingenuity, efficiency, scale and power of corporations while being driven entirely by the motive to eradicate the world of poverty, of pollution, of injustice. The numbers are staggering: Grameen has 8 million borrowers, 97% of whom are women and all of whom are poor. They have 20,000 employees, a staggeringly high repayment rate, 4 million bank accounts for non Grameen borrowers (all borrowers must open an account so that they can deposit their required weekly savings there), and have turned a profit all but three years of operation. Lastly, they are 95% owned by the borrowers themselves—each borrower gets a share in the company—and 5% owned by the Bangladesh government. In short, Grameen’s Nobel Peace Prize was well deserved.

Posted by Nabeel on 01/04 at 11:07 PM
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First Blog Post From Bangladesh—Actually, From the Bahrain Airport

Saturday, January 02, 2010

This photo is from our first flight from Boston to London on 1-01-10

Jill and I are currently in the airport in Bahrain waiting for the third, and final, leg of our 28 hour trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh. We left Boston on the first of January at 7:20 PM and arrived in London at 6:50 AM on the second. As you can see from the photo above, we really lucked out in terms of our seating on the first flight: we got the seats that are usually reserved for flight attendants when they take naps on long flight; as a result, we had seats that could recline all the way down (even though we were in coach) and we had as much leg room as we could possibly want! The flight went smoothly and, as I have been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich—an absolutely fascinating history of Hitler’s Germany—the time passed rather quickly. Our second flight took us from London to Bahrain, where we are currently in the midst of a seven hour layover before one final flight to Dhaka.

We couldn’t resist taking a photo of this display inside the airport terminal in Bahrain

Both Jill and I are extremely excited to begin the training with Grameen Bank, though we are also somewhat tired from all the travel. Personally, I can say that I consider Grameen to be one of the beacons of hope for creating a world in which poverty, as Muhammad Yunus likes to say, is “relegated to museums” and people around the world have the health, safety and economic opportunity they need to lead fulfilling lives. I am certain that over the next three weeks we will learn much, experience much and come up with many ideas that we can implement at Capital Good Fund. We are inspired and honored to have this opportunity to learn from a Nobel Peace Prize winning organization, and we are confident that this experience will help us to make Capital Good Fund even more effective and innovative as we worked towards realizing our mission of creating poverty-free, inclusive green economy in the United States.