The opportunity for smallholder financing is enormous. Fewer than 10 percent of the nearly half billion of the world’s smallholder farmers operate in organized farmer groups that have benefited from agriculture financial services initiatives.
In the fall of 2004, a small group of entrepreneurs attended a weekend gathering to discuss solutions for poverty alleviation. The result was Grameen Foundation’s Growth Guarantee program. Ten years later the program has been one of the most successful global efforts to unlock capital for microfinance clients.
Achieve competitive financial returns and make a difference at the same time by applying the information in Compelling Returns: A Practical Guide to Socially Responsible Investing, a well-rounded guide to socially responsible investing (SRI). Understand the basics of SRI and discover how you can align your values with your investments by choosing from three basic strategies. Learn to implement these strategies in your investment portfolios and combine your newfound knowledge with the basic principles of successful investing. An up-to-date directory of companies involved with SRI is included.
This book is the compelling story of the Grameen Bank, one of the most successful development organizations in the world. Founded by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1976, the Grameen Bank has extended small loans for self-employment to more than two million women villagers and has helped lift hundreds of thousands out of poverty. The Grameen Bank's "trickle up" approach has inspired the creation of hundreds of "micro-credit" programs around the world and helped to reshape international development policy.
Reviews:
"By giving poor people the power to help themselves, Dr. Yunus has offered them something far more valuable than a plate of food - security in its most fundamental form."―President Jimmy Carter
"[Yunus's] ideas have already had a great impact on the Third World, and ... hearing his appeal for a 'poverty-free world' from the source itself can be as stirring as that all-American myth of bootstrap success."―Washington Post
Inside front flap: The stark reality of global poverty—the poorest half of the world's population owns less than one percent of its assets, and that nearly one billion people subsist on less than $1 per day—rarely registers even a ripple in the international media. Western attempts to stem hunger and poverty are often piecemeal and ineffective, applying band-aids rather than finding permanent solutions. But Muhammad Yunus, visionary founder of the Grameen Bank, has demonstrated different and more inclusive ways of approaching the problems that confront humanity. In creating Grameen, he turned the conventional wisdom of traditional financial institutions on its head: instead of seeking out wealthy people with collateral and excluding the poor, Yunus sought out the impoverished and excluded the rich. His approach, known as microfinance, has revolutionized global antipoverty efforts.
Co-published by Grameen Foundation & American Red Cross
Muhammad Yunus, the practical visionary who pioneered microcredit and, with his Grameen Bank, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, has developed a visionary new dimension for capitalism which he calls “social business.” By harnessing the energy of profit-making to the objective of fulfilling human needs, social business creates self-supporting, viable commercial enterprises that generate economic growth even as they produce goods and services that make the world a better place.
This comprehensive guide was developed by Grameen Foundation and Grameen Trust to provide microfinance institutions seeking to learn from the Grameen Bank approach with the information they need to create or expand programs to provide financial services to the poor.
Grameen Foundation discuss regulatory issues that must be addressed to push mobile microfinance forward and the next big opportunity for mobile network operators, third-party platform providers and financial institutions. This is the eight and final post in our Next Billion series on what it takes for institutions that provide microfinance services to go digital.