NEW YORK -- "Senoras!" calls the banker, summoning her borrowers to notice at their maiden loan-repayment meeting. The small-business borrowers -- day-care providers, clothing sellers, jewelry makers -- squeeze into the living cubicle where their children are napping, eating cereal and watching TV. They are portion of a nascent lending program created by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for developing the Grameen Bank, which uses micro-loans to inform eradicate beggary in developing nations.
But these women are not in Bangladesh, they are in Queens. They are amidst the beforehand 100 borrowers of Grameen America, which began disbursing loans in January. This is the inception metre Grameen has progression its program in a developed country. "I just want to finish a dollop better, and one broad daylight own a unimaginative ancestry or something," said Socorro Diaz, 54, a borrower who sells women's lingerie and jewelry. "I'm tiresome to switch my life. Bit by bit.
" Grameen America, which offers loans from $500 to $3,000, hopes to make contact with consumers fellow her, interest of the muscular joint of straitened Americans without access to credit, said Ritu Chattree, the imperfection president for back and development. They are bakers who can only gain enough eggs and exploit for a day's calling because they cannot furnish a restaurant refrigerator to warehouse ingredients. They are vendors who refer to small change commonplace to charter a cart.
They are whisker salon owners who transcribe out loans every chance they need to buy shampoo. They often use bail shops, or fall upo a live off to check-cashing stores, loan sharks, and payday lenders, which can load concern rates of 200 or 300 percent, Chattree said. "You suppose this is normal, because you grew up with it," said Yunus of such high-interest lending in a late-model meeting with the Financial Times.
"This is an queer situation, because of the hornet's nest with the fiscal system, so we have to adjust the financial system." His adjusting begins with this experiment in the outlander neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens. Three groups of five borrowers follow the conclave in the apartment of Jenny Guante, 40, who makes grey and gold jewelry and runs a profoundly daytime care.
Some are making weekly credit payments; the largest pay is $66 on a $3,000 loan. Guante, the group's chairwoman, counts the banknotes carefully before momentary it to Alethia Mendez, the Grameen stave fellow who serves as community banker and center director. "I've known these race forever," said one borrower in the roomful of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. "We grew up together.
We went to middle school together around the corner." That handcuffs helps occupy appoint payments, said Chattree. If one housekeeper is having illness repaying a advance because, say, her spouse is unwell and she has to care for him and the children, another of her group might chuck in to help with child care. Loan disbursements for the uncut group are slowed if one human defaults, she said.
After the meeting, as several women inclination off into the galley with a calculator to discuss their plans, 10 unfamiliar prospective borrowers be over by the apartment. The program began in 1974, when Yunus lent $27 to a body of mean villagers and realized that even under age amounts could make transformative differences. He set up the Grameen Bank, which has since disbursed about $6 billion in microscopic loans to about 7.4 million Bangladeshi micro-entrepreneurs, mostly women in businesses such as byway vending and farming.
In Bangladesh, Grameen also functions as a savings bank, makes college and accommodation loans, and operates projects in areas such as telecommunications, yogurt play and solar energy. The quandary with capitalism, Yunus says, is its division between companies pursuing welfare and charities pursuing good. His bank epitome operates with corporate efficiency, but pumps profits back into common objectives. The borrowers in Queens are following Grameen's independent show in the developing world.
But Yunus acknowledges that the United States is manifold from the seven countries where Grameen operates its accommodation programs, or the dozens of others where Grameen has offered detailed advice. Here, there is more regulation, so a soul cannot just set up a also waggon and peddle cakes without a permit. The profit methodology discourages income-generating activities, Yunus says. "If you get a dollar, that dollar is to be deducted from your felicity check.
If you want to cease welfare, then you overcome your trim benefits," he told the Financial Times. Rules for scene up a bank are cumbersome for a micro-operation, and Yunus has met with the noggin of the Federal Reserve and members of Congress to converse about creating more amenable legitimate frameworks. Grameen America will crush even when it has 20,000 borrowers, Chattree said, a adjust she expects to execute in three to five years. That is something that no American micro-lender has achieved, said Michael Chu, a expert in micro-finance at Harvard.
"In general, the tender-hearted is that micro-finance doesn't job in the States," said Chattree, even though many groups, including some aided by the Grameen Trust, have followed the Grameen model.
Esteemed opinion post: here
No comments:
Post a Comment