Abstract
The famous Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus (Bengali: মুহাম্মদ ইউনূস) began his career as a commercial banker serving mostly well-off individuals, small businesses, and corporations. Following several years of working in the commercial sector, however, he felt little satisfaction with his job as a banker to the economically well off. He turned his attention instead to the credit needs of the poor, especially to the needs of rural women struggling to establish small enterprises and to the urban poor, including the street beggars living and working in all major cities in Bangladesh. Yunus recognized that the most limiting characteristic of the poor was their inability to obtain credit at reasonable rates from commercial banks to initiate businesses or other enterprises of their own. After all, who is going to lend even a few Takas (0.88 Taka = 1 USD) to a blind man selling pencils or beverages from a communal cup on the streets of Dhaka? Indeed, who would be willing to invest in the credit needs of an impoverished woman who wanted to establish small gardens in which she and her friends could grow fruits or vegetables for sale to neighbors or local markets.
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Notes
- 1.
Purchasing power parity is an economic theory that compares different countries’ currencies through a “basket of goods” approach. According to this concept, two currencies are in equilibrium or at par when a basket of goods (considering the exchange rate) is priced the same in both countries. Closely related to purchasing power parity is the law of one price , which is an economic theory that predicts that after accounting for differences in interest rates and exchange rates, the cost of something in country X should be the same as that in country Y in real terms (Hall, 2018).
- 2.
See Kuhn (1996) for a fuller discussion of the range of revolutionary paradigms that drive the social policies of nations.
- 3.
The Gini index or Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912. It is often used as a gauge of economic inequality, measuring income distribution or, less commonly, wealth distribution among a population. The coefficient ranges from 0 (or 0%) to 1 (or 100%), with 0 representing perfect equality and 1 representing perfect inequality. Values over 1 are theoretically possible due to negative income or wealth (Investopedia, 2018).
- 4.
The eight Millennium Development Goals were established by the United Nations in 2005 for the purpose of (1) eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; (2) achieving universal primary school education; (3) promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women; (4) reducing child mortality; (5) improving maternal health; (6) combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; (7) ensuring environmental sustainability; and (8) establishing a global partnership for development (United Nations 2010; United Nations Development Programme, 2016).
- 5.
“Civil society organizations often are referred to as non-governmental organizations, private voluntary organizations, or as the third or independent sector. This chapter uses the umbrella term “civil society organizations” to include all private, voluntary organizations that are established and largely financed by people themselves to carry out some public benefit activity that they either do not want government to undertake (e.g., family planning services) or which government for a variety of reasons cannot or should not undertake (e.g., support for religions and the performance of religious services).
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Estes, R.J. (2019). Putting Poverty into a Museum. In: The Social Progress of Nations Revisited, 1970–2020. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 78. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15907-8_9
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