- Title
- Women and poverty: is Grameen Bank the answer?
- Creator
- Rozario, Santi
- Relation
- Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies: JIGS Vol. 6, Issue 2, p. 60-82
- Relation
- http://www.newcastle.edu.au/school/hss/research/publications/jigs/jigs-index.html
- Publisher
- University of Newcastle, Faculty of Education and Arts
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2001
- Description
- Grameen Bank’s activities, especially its microcredit scheme, as we are often told, are directed at the “poorest of the poor”, those who are most in need of assistance. It makes its loans primarily to poor rural women, who are, in theory, organised into mutual support groups. These rural women meet the repayment schedules on their loans with a remarkable regularity, thus allowing the bank to achieve its commercial viability and its extraordinary growth. The loan recovery rate is said to average 98 percent. In fact, so impressive has been Grameen Bank’s success that it has not only been widely imitated in Bangladesh, but it has been taken up as a model to be replicated throughout and beyond the developing world. By the mid-1990’s, Grameen Bank-style microcredit schemes had come to be regarded as a virtual panacea for poverty, as the one major success in the largely dismal record of poverty reduction in poor Third World societies such as Bangladesh. There is no doubt that Professor Mohammad Yunus, the founder and managing director of Grameen Bank, is an effective advocate for his institution. But can Grameen Bank really solve the problem of the “poorest of the poor”, and does the model of microcredit on which Grameen Bank is based really deserve to be duplicated throughout the developing world to the exclusion of other more traditional approaches to development? Are there other models of microcredit which would be more appropriate for the situation of poor rural women in countries such as Bangladesh?
- Subject
- Grameen Bank; women; poverty; microcredit scheme
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1046872
- Identifier
- uon:14701
- Identifier
- ISSN:1325-1848
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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