“A man has only one death. That death may be as weighty as Mount Tai, or it may be as light as a goose feather. It all depends upon the way he uses it.”
Source: Granite Studio
Archive for January 16, 2007
Microfinance has been a success in many parts of Asia, especially Bangaldesh and India. It has spread to many parts of the world. The most famous financial innovation of this nature is micro-credit popularized by Grameen Bank.
According to the Wikipedia:
Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to the unemployed, to poor entrepreneurs and to others living in poverty who are not bankable. These individuals lack collateral, steady employment and a verifiable credit history and therefore cannot meet even the most minimum qualifications to gain access to traditional credit. Microcredit is a part of microfinance, which is the provision of financial services to the very poor; apart from loans, it includes savings, microinsurance and other financial innovations.
Trivia:I had the chance to contribute on Micro-finance to the book WorldChanging.
Mohammad Yunus and Grammen Bank recieved the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.
In his Nobel Lecture Yunus suggests the reasons for Poverty and that why we should eliminate it from this world.
World’s income distribution gives a very telling story. Ninety four percent of the world income goes to 40 percent of the population while sixty percent of people live on only 6 per cent of world income. Half of the world population lives on two dollars a day. Over one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. This is no formula for peace.
Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. For building stable peace we must find ways to provide opportunities for people to live decent lives.
The creation of opportunities for the majority of people – the poor – is at the heart of the work that we have dedicated ourselves to during the past 30 years.
I am in favor of strengthening the freedom of the market. At the same time, I am very unhappy about the conceptual restrictions imposed on the players in the market. This originates from the assumption that entrepreneurs are one-dimensional human beings, who are dedicated to one mission in their business lives to maximize profit. This interpretation of capitalism insulates the entrepreneurs from all political, emotional, social, spiritual, environmental dimensions of their lives. This was done perhaps as a reasonable simplification, but it stripped away the very essentials of human life.
Human beings are a wonderful creation embodied with limitless human qualities and capabilities. Our theoretical constructs should make room for the blossoming of those qualities, not assume them away.
Many of the world’s problems exist because of this restriction on the players of free-market. The world has not resolved the problem of crushing poverty that half of its population suffers.
We get what we want, or what we don’t refuse. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us, and that poverty is part of human destiny. This is precisely why we continue to have poor people around us. If we firmly believe that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have built appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.
We wanted to go to the moon, so we went there. We achieve what we want to achieve. If we are not achieving something, it is because we have not put our minds to it. We create what we want.
I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social system that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue.
Poverty is created because we built our theoretical framework on assumptions which under-estimates human capacity, by designing concepts, which are too narrow (such as concept of business, credit- worthiness, entrepreneurship, employment) or developing institutions, which remain half-done (such as financial institutions, where poor are left out). Poverty is caused by the failure at the conceptual level, rather than any lack of capability on the part of people.
To me poor people are like bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a flower-pot, you get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted, only the soil-base that is too inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong in their seeds. Simply, society never gave them the base to grow on. All it needs to get the poor people out of poverty for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly.
Let us join hands to give every human being a fair chance to unleash their energy and creativity.
At the end of the day poverty is a consequence of government policies including the economic development of the region. Private and social entrepreneurship has an opportunity to be innovative and help in this process pursuing their own private goals.
The East Asia Summit is a major step forward for co-operation among the Asiann countries including India, Australia and New Zealand.
You can view an interactive map here.
The summit brings together 16 countries where they have suggested to form a trading bloc like the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement but which will cover half the world’s population and what could be termed the future growth engine for world economic growth.
The 16 countries that would be included in the free-trade area are Japan, China, India, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.
The summit provided steps towards energy security and bio-fuel production. Interestingly, for the first time various Asian nations including China and India are committing to cut down fossil fuel use through energy efficiency, better technology, alternative fuels including nuclear energy.
The declaration calls for moves to improve energy efficiency and reduce dependence on fossil fuels, while urging countries to expand renewable energy systems and biofuel production and “for interested parties, civilian nuclear power.”
It also calls for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and ensuring a stable supply of energy “through investments in regional infrastructure such as the ASEAN power grid and the trans-ASEAN gas pipeline.”
The New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark is happy due to the focus on the environment on such a high level summit.
A pledge by Asian countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of a regional energy security pact is a welcome first step, even without concrete targets, New Zealand’s prime minister said on Monday.
Clark, 56, said New Zealand had worked to get the climate change reference into the declaration.
“Up until then the motivation for discussing these issues had been more on the problems arising from the price of oil and the volatility and the security questions of the issues but we are coming at it also very much also from a sustainability issue.”
Eenrgy security is vital to increase the standard of living for the majority of the world poor who are based in Asia and the head of the Asian Development Bank urged East Asian countries, which account for around a fifth of global trade, to create a massive free-trade bloc to pull 750 million of their citizens out of dire poverty.
Bio-fuels could be a good idea however, Matthew Warren in The Australian suggests that This is likely to alarm many environmentalists, who fear the scale of production required to achieve this geopolitical objective will only come through wholesale land clearing needed to produce the raw materials.
I believe this is a first step forward towards Asian economic integration and a better road forward towards peace in the region.
