One of the most familiar critiques of the social (or not-for-profit) sector by those outside of it – those in business or academia, for example – is that we are a very fragmented community of organizations that don’t talk to each other, much less collaborate as often as we should. This results in duplication of effort and capacity, as well as unnecessary and unhealthy competition. While often exaggerated, this criticism has some merit, and the socially-motivated international microfinance networks (as well as the microfinance sector generally) are hardly immune. (We have our own criticisms of business and academia, but we’ll leave those for another day.)
For microfinance, 2010 was a year of upheaval and taking stock. When it began, crises of various origins were still being felt in Morocco, Pakistan and Nicaragua. Twelve days into the year, a massive earthquake hit Haiti, negatively affecting many microfinance institutions (MFIs) there. Fortunately, Haitian MFIs, including Grameen Foundation’s long-time partner Fonkoze, have bounced back faster than anyone expected, as I have written in a separate blog.
A few months later, a controversial initial public offering by SKS Microfinance, a leading MFI in India, led to a backlash among the media, political leaders and civil society in general – especially in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. (In the early days of that crisis I debated the founder of SKS, which was quite interesting to say the least!) As the year ended, the Bangladeshi government began to harshly criticize and harass Grameen Bank, the country’s flagship MFI, which led to violence against the bank’s employees and, ultimately, to the forced and premature retirement of its founder, microfinance pioneer Professor Muhammad Yunus. (For more on the Bangladesh crisis, click here.)
Debate moderator Niki Armacost, co-founder of Arc Finance, with Alex Counts, at his October 2010 debate with Vikram Akula, chair and founder of SKS, at the Asia Society.
This was a far cry from the celebrations of microfinance in 2005, the U.N.’s “International Year of Microcredit,” and 2006, when Grameen Bank and its founder, Prof. Yunus, unexpectedly – and in my mind deservedly – shared the Nobel Peace Prize. The fact that microfinance in most countries (and even in most states in India, the world’s largest market for microfinance) remained largely unaffected, and in fact continued to grow and contribute to poverty reduction, was rarely noted in the media or even at industry conferences. There was a lot of soul-searching and hand-wringing, and perhaps a bit of panic.
Recently I had the pleasure of visiting our sister organization, Grameen America, which has been providing microfinance services to low-income, mostly Hispanic clients in New York since 2008, and has since opened branches in Omaha and Indianapolis. My host was GA’s CEO of Operations, Shah Newaz, someone I have known for more than 20 years.
When I first arrived in Bangladesh, Shah was head of Grameen Bank’s audio-visual unit, and later became the longest-serving zonal manager in the bank’s history. (A zonal manager is the most senior field-based position in Grameen Bank’s structure.) Some years after that, he served as a senior technical consultant for Grameen Foundation in the Dominican Republic, where he did a great job and picked up some Spanish (which he has continued to perfect in his new role).
Alex Counts attends a Grameen America center meeting in Jackson Heights, NY. (Photo by H.A. Shah Newaz.)
I was interested in how GA was progressing for a lot of reasons. My book Small Loans, Big Dreams extensively examined one of the earliest microfinance programs in the United States, the Full Circle Fund. While doing that research, my eyes were opened for the first time to the vibrancy of the grassroots economy in many inner-cities. Later, I became involved in microfinance institutions in the United States that Grameen Foundation also supported: Project Enterprise in New York City, the PLAN Fund in Dallas and the New Opportunities program of Volunteers of America in Los Angeles. Though the LA program was phased out, the other two continue providing microfinance effectively while drawing on the Grameen Bank model extensively. However, they operate on a relatively small scale, even as they try to serve a lower-income population (including many African-Americans) than other microfinance and microenterprise programs here serve.
Professor Muhammad Yunus recently paid a visit to Grameen Foundation headquarters, meeting with leaders and speaking to staff (as well as to staff from RESULTS) during a visit to Washington, DC. Todd Bernhardt, Grameen Foundation’s Director of Marketing and Communications, was part of an audience who listened to Professor Muhammad Yunus speak, and provides this update on his recent activities.
Prof. Yunus recently visited our DC office.
It’s hard to believe that it was only a bit more than three months ago that microfinance pioneer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Professor Muhammad Yunus stepped down from his post as Managing Director of Grameen Bank, the poverty-fighting organization that he founded in the late ‘70s. During the government’s campaign to remove him from office (read this Fact Sheet to find out more), many Grameen Foundation supporters voiced their concern about Prof. Yunus and the independence of Grameen Bank, and have wondered about his activities since then, asking us to provide an update. A recent visit by Prof. Yunus to Washington, DC, provided us with an opportunity to catch up with him personally, while demonstrating to everyone who spoke with him that his commitment to fighting poverty through innovative solutions remains as firm as ever.
Grameen Foundation President and CEO Alex Counts welcomes Prof. Yunus (right) while Microcredit Summit Campaign Director and RESULTS founder Sam Daley-Harris listens.
Prof. Yunus stayed in Washington from Aug. 10-13, giving a keynote speech at the annual forum of InterAction (an alliance of U.S.-based international NGOs focusing on the world’s poor and vulnerable populations), making several media appearances (he spoke with NPR’s Kojo Nnamdi and Andrea Stone at The Huffington Post) and meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
He also met with a number of leaders in the international-development community – including Grameen Foundation President and CEO Alex Counts and Sam Daley-Harris, Director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign and founder of RESULTS, a anti-poverty lobbying organization – and spent a morning speaking to the staff of those organizations at Grameen Foundation’s DC headquarters.
Focusing on the Social Business
In all of his visits, Prof. Yunus emphasized the need to develop and popularize the social business, which he wrote about in his book Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. Simply put, social businesses are for-profit entities created primarily to serve a social goal. Such businesses strive to generate modest profits that are used to fund and expand operations, rather than to pay dividends to investors.
Since his departure from Grameen Bank, Prof. Yunus has continued to advocate for its independence from government control and to defend the interests of the Bank’s 8.3 million borrower-owners (97% of whom are poor women). Bank employees have continued to keep operations running smoothly while the Bangladesh government has seemingly turned its attention away from the Bank to unrest in the country caused by, among other things, moves to amend the constitution to remove the non-party caretaker system that oversees the country during general elections.
But many people fear that the government’s apparent lack of interest in taking control of the Bank may prove to be temporary, and that it may move again soon to amend the Bank’s bylaws and change the composition of its Board. With this in mind, Prof. Yunus urged the group assembled at the Grameen Foundation offices to remain vigilant and work with others around the world to ensure that the rights of the 8.3 million owners of the Bank are protected. “We have to stand behind them,” he said. (You can help by signing this petition asking the Bangladeshi government to keep Grameen Bank independent.)
He then reviewed the progress made by Bangladesh over the past 30 years, explaining that it was because of the power of ordinary people working together in civil society that the quality of life had improved for so many. Social business, he said, provides another way for people to work together to achieve social aims, leveraging the power of capitalism and the free market. “Business can be used to solve problems, not just to make money,” he explained. “Money is not the way to happiness. We make ourselves happy by making other people happy.”
Prof. Yunus talks to staff at Grameen Foundation’s DC headquarters about the Asian Social Business Forum recently held in Japan, while Sam Daley-Harris and Alex Counts look on.
Prof. Yunus has been traveling the world explaining the social-business concept, meeting with enthusiastic responses in the developed world (he told the group about a recent and very successful visit to Japan, which is looking at social business as an approach in rebuilding after the tsunami of last March) and in the developing world (he has been invited to visit Haiti in October to show people there how the concept could help them improve civil society). In addition to describing a successful series of events that were held around the world on Social Business Day, June 28, he said is looking forward even more to a series of meetings in November, including the Social Business Summit in Vienna on Nov. 10-12, and the Global Microcredit Summit in Spain on Nov. 14-17.
It’s Up to Us
In taking questions from the staff at Grameen Foundation offices, Prof. Yunus emphasized the power of the individual, as well as our responsibility to empower them – all for the overall good of society. “Peace can be threatened by poverty,” he explained. Microfinance and social businesses create opportunities that “keep people from being dependent … and helps them channel their energies into positive avenues, away from violence.” Creating such opportunity, he said, also helps to address inequalities on a larger scale – between groups of people and even nations – reducing tensions and resentment.
It’s up to all of us, he concluded, to change how we view, and interact with, the world. In capitalist societies, people grow up “wearing ‘profit-maximizing glasses,’ but if you take off those glasses and put on the social-business glasses, everything looks differently! New possibilities open to you.” He gave the example of Danone, which is involved in a social business in Bangladesh that makes inexpensive, nutritious yogurt available for poor women to sell to other poor people. When Danone was starting this enterprise, and asked its shareholders if they would like to invest part of their dividends in a new business that would help people but not give them additional financial return on their investment, 98% signed up, resulting in millions of euros in investment. “Give people a choice to help others,” Prof. Yunus concluded with a smile, “and they will come through.”
Grameen Foundation has been working for 14 years to advance a certain approach to microfinance – one that is rooted in the experiences, achievements and philosophy of Grameen Bank. Though we do not promote any particular methodology (i.e., a certain means of providing financial or human development services to the poor), we do focus on and try to advance a set of principles and standards. Methodologies are very context-specific, while principles endure and standards are universal. (We approach our technology-for-development work similarly, but that is beyond the scope of this short post.)
Some of the principles are not particularly controversial or microfinance-specific – things like a commitment to transparency, innovation, being client-centered, investing in the human capital of employees, promoting gender equality and so on. Others are specific to microfinance, such as bundling financial and human development services wherever possible, measuring and managing social performance on par with financial performance, mobilizing loan capital locally (through savings or local currency borrowings), and local (or indigenous) ownership and governance. Among the latter, there are some thoughtful people in our movement (or industry, as some prefer to call it) who would disagree with the wisdom of these principles. I say that to emphasize that these are not meaningless slogans that everyone agrees on.
Talking about principles and standards, and about our work to champion innovation that spreads them throughout the microfinance sector, can seem abstract at times, even though we are clearer than ever that this is how Grameen Foundation can have the greatest impact. Sometimes we find it helpful to focus on individual organizations that embody these principles and meet these standards, however imperfectly, to deepen our own understanding of how microfinance can evolve, and also further the understanding of people who support our organization in various ways. With microfinance coming under increasing scrutiny by regulators, the media and politicians, holding up pace-setting institutions is an important part of educating stakeholders about what microfinance can be, and arguably should be.
During his recent trip to Haiti, Alex met extensively with the borrowers and staff of Fonkoze, including founder Father Joseph Philippe (left).
With my second sabbatical approaching (at Grameen Foundation we get one every seven years), I decided to pick one such organization and write a book about it for a general audience. It was not that hard to decide which one – I chose Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest MFI. It is a dynamic, innovative, risk-taking organization led by fascinating people – mostly Haitians and Haitian-Americans, but also a few Americans and Europeans – in a country that has been in the news in recently (for all the wrong reasons, unfortunately). It has also been a beneficiary of Grameen Foundation’s products and services for more than a decade.
I began my sabbatical on June 16 and a few days later was down in Haiti – my fifth and longest trip yet to that sad and surprising country. Shortly before going, I began a blog that would chronicle the process of researching and writing the book, and invited people around the world to participate in the creative process. I have been posting short written reflections, photos and videos (most under two minutes) ever since.
My goals for this project are aggressive. I want it to be a New York Times best-seller! (Why the heck not?) I also want it to generate significant new partners and funders for Grameen Foundation, Fonkoze and organizations that operate along similar lines. (All the royalties from the book will go to Grameen Foundation.) And I want it to change the narrative in the mainstream media from simplistic answers to the “what’s wrong with microfinance” question to more interesting analyses of how it is evolving in some places to be an even more potent poverty-fighting strategy than earlier models. I plan to have the book in stores by the third anniversary of the Haiti earthquake (January 12, 2013).
Ambitious? Yes! But with new “friends” of this project coming forward every day – consider yourself invited! – it just might be achievable.
Grameen Foundation founder, President and CEO Alex Counts is in the beginning phase of working on a new book on microfinance in Haiti, focusing in particular on the country’s best-known microfinance institution, Fonkoze.
Alex is in Haiti now, conducting research and working closely with Fonkoze staff and meeting with borrowers to find out more about what’s working, what’s not, and the organization’s overall impact on the poor. You can follow along with Alex’s progress at his blog, where he is posting updates on his activities, including videos and drafts from his book. As Alex says, “I hope lots of people will take interest in this project, check out the postings and comment on them, so I can improve my thinking and writing, and even repost/circulate what I post to draw in others.”
Alex Counts (right) with Fonkoze borrowers in Haiti.
All proceeds from the book, which Alex expects to publish in early 2013, will benefit Grameen Foundation and our efforts to empower the poor through access to small loans, valuable information and unique business opportunities. Alex has also set up a Facebook page for the book, which we encourage you to “like” and follow!
Statement of Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus on the Occasion of Supreme Court Verdict on May 5, 2011 Regarding His Removal from Grameen Bank. Professor Yunus voiced his concern after revelations surfaced surrounding violence against employee leaders of the Bank. Those interested may also want to read in the Bank’s point-by-point refutation of the allegations brought up in the government’s Review Committee report, as well as by the nation’s government-aligned media.
You have already heard the verdict from the Supreme Court.
Why did I appear before the Court? Why did I want to contest the order of Bangladesh Bank? Why there is so much concern about this issue at home and abroad? There may be some confusion regarding these questions. Please allow me to share my feelings with you to remove this confusion. I went to the Court for a specific reason. Bangladesh Bank sent a letter to Grameen Bank, removing me from my post as Managing Director of Grameen Bank. The letter also mentioned that I held this position for the last eleven years illegally. Bangladesh Bank did this without giving me a chance to explain my position. I felt that this letter was not legally correct, and through this letter, not only was I been wronged, but so was Grameen Bank. Nine elected members of the Board of Directors of Grameen Bank felt the same way. That is why the nine members of the Board and I filed separate writs in the High Court. We wanted these wrongs to be corrected. Therefore, we had to seek justice through all avenues offered in the Bangladeshi judicial system. This is what we have done.
The fate of 40 million poor people connected to this
In the event that the Honorable Court stated in their final decision that the letter from Bangladesh Bank was issued without lawful authority, I could continue my work with Grameen Bank and make the transition to a capable management as smoothly as possible. But, if the Court verdict went against us, the Board may be forced to take steps to implement the content of the Bangladesh Bank letter. This was the only reason for me to take this matter to the Court. I had no option but to seek justice in this matter.
It is indeed a much wider and much more significant issue to save the future of Grameen Bank and also to protect the hopes and dreams of the over 8 million borrowers. These borrowers are also the owners of 96.5% of the Bank’s shares. The Bank is connected with 40 million microcredit borrowers in Bangladesh, and its impact on all these people cannot be neglected. What happens to Grameen Bank influences the future of the millions of Bangladeshis who benefit from microcredit activities, as well as the future of the institution of microcredit itself. It is actually a great concern for me, and many others, that I properly fulfill my responsibility to safeguard their future before and after leaving the post of Managing Director of Grameen Bank.
Some have said that, instead of going to the court, it would have been more honorable for me to resign from my position as suggested by the Finance Minister. I do not think so. In that case, the end result would have been the same, so far as my exit is concerned. But I would have suffered from carrying the guilt of knowingly accepting an unexpected proposal and putting the borrowers and their families’ futures at risk. I could not do that.
Millions of borrowers like the ones seen meeting above could be adversely affected by a government takeover of Grameen Bank.
Some people felt that I intend to cling to the position of Managing Director of Grameen Bank. But, the nation knows that this position is not my life’s goal. I was, and am, conscious of the fact that my future work will not be based on my holding on to this position, but rather, it would be working with the young generation, from other platforms to address the problem of poverty at home and abroad. I want to do that without jeopardizing the interests of Grameen Bank. This is the thought which prompted me to write the letter to the Honorable Finance Minister one year ago. I suggested two options to him for a transition that could take place without creating any waves within the Bank. I did not get any response to these proposals. I was, instead, told to quit. It is, therefore, unfair to me to suggest that I am holding on to the of position of managing director unjustly or to allege that I am not co-operating in the process of transition.
For the last few months, a section of the media devoted itself fiercely to campaign against me, Grameen Bank, and the concept of microcredit. Everyone has his own explanation why this is happening.
An unfriendly atmosphere is not helpful for a smooth change of leadership
The cause of my concerns, as well as those of the nation and the world, lies here. These concerns are more for Grameen Bank and the future of its millions of borrowers, than for me. For this reason, I have been reminding you repeatedly that undertaking the transition process of Grameen Bank’s management in an unfriendly environment will only cause harm to the future of the Bank. I have always wanted to make sure that the transition takes place in a friendly, mutually supportive environment, so that the achievements of Grameen Bank may continue without interruption. There are many issues related to this. The big questions are: whether Grameen Bank can maintain its independent existence, and whether it can be successful in keeping itself away from political influences. What actually happens to financial institutions in our country if political influences start playing a role in these institutions is common knowledge. This experience will not inspire trust in the borrowers. We all know how important the role of trust is in the operation of Grameen Bank.
A guest post from Sam Daley-Harris, Founder of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, which seeks to reach 175 million poorest families with micro-loans, and of RESULTS, which seeks to create the political will to end poverty.
The deed is done. On May 5th, the appellate division of the Bangladesh Supreme Court agreed that the Bangladesh Bank, the nation’s central bank, was justified in firing Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus from his post as Managing Director of Grameen Bank, the institution he founded more than three decades ago. Prof. Yunus’s lead lawyer, Dr. Kamal Hossain, one of Bangladesh’s most distinguished attorneys and a drafter of the nation’s constitution, was scarcely able to hide his disgust at the Appellate Division order, when he said, “I [apparently] have to take admission to university again to newly learn the constitutional laws of the 21st century.”
The dismissal is not the lone action of one government institution, but is part of a premeditated campaign that starts at the highest level, with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Their reason for sacking Prof. Yunus? He’s “too old.” Never mind that the 70-year-old Yunus maintains a rigorous schedule or that the Finance Minister, another key player in the sacking, is at 77 somehow not “too old” for that post.
The dismissal of Prof. Yunus from his post as Managing Director of Grameen Bank could portend ominous changes by the Bangladesh government.
Their excuse would be laughable if it were not for the calamitous impact it portends. What makes the decision to remove Prof. Yunus so disgraceful is not that he would be out of a job – any university in the world would welcome him with open arms as a visiting professor. No, the atrocity here is the fact that the independence and integrity of one of the world’s premier poverty-fighting institutions is now at grave risk. Grameen Bank, an extraordinary institution with more than 8 million microcredit borrowers that took 35 years to build, could be destroyed in a matter of months by incompetent government action.
The government’s action cannot honestly be in response to accusations by a Danish documentary maker about an improper transfer of Norwegian aid funds more than a dozen years ago, because both the Norwegian government and Bangladesh’s own review committee have found that Grameen Bank did nothing wrong. It cannot be due to the documentary maker’s charge of excessive interest rates, because Microfinance Transparency and the government’s own review committee found that Grameen Bank has the lowest interest rates in the country. Instead, most observers see this as an inexcusable political vendetta by the Prime Minister against Prof. Yunus, stemming from his short-lived attempt to start a political party in 2007.
Consider these groundbreaking innovations that Prof. Yunus’ poverty-fighting laboratory has brought to the world, and what could be lost in the future from his unwarranted ouster:
In 1976 he made loans of less than US$1 each to 42 desperately poor Bangladeshis to start or build tiny businesses – and the microcredit revolution was born. It has made its way all around the world. While others have seen microfinance as a way to make big money for investors, Prof. Yunus has never once diverted from his original intent to empower the poor.
In 1997 Grameen Phone Ladies started bringing cell phone technology to remote villagers throughout Bangladesh – providing the dual benefit of creating jobs and increasing communications, which enhanced others’ work.
Grameen Shakti, an energy firm, has installed more than a half-million solar home systems and sold more than a quarter-million improved cooking stoves.
In a joint venture with Danone, the yogurt maker headquartered in France, Grameen Danone is bringing low-cost fortified yogurt to malnourished children throughout the country – and creating a business opportunity for the poor women who sell it.
College scholarships and loans have gone to 180,000 students. Most remarkably, in almost all of the cases, these are the children of illiterate parents who have had the help of Grameen Bank in breaking the bonds of inter-generational illiteracy.
A government that so rashly and ruthlessly ousts this innovative and transformational leader cannot likely be trusted to continue his revolutionary work.
But the deed is done. Here is a sample of the visionary voice that Bangladesh has likely lost in this despicable government act. Reflecting on the 1997 Microcredit Summit, Prof. Yunus wrote: “In teaching economics I learned about money, and now as head of a bank I lend money. The success of our venture lies in how many crumpled bank bills our once starving members now have in their hands. But the microcredit movement, which is built around, and for, and with money, ironically, is at its heart, at its deepest root not about money at all. It is about helping each person to achieve his or her fullest potential. It is not about cash capital, it is about human capital. Money is merely a tool that unlocks human dreams and helps even the poorest and most unfortunate people on this planet achieve dignity, respect, and meaning in their lives.”
Shannon Maynard is the Director of Bankers without Borders, Grameen Foundation’s skills-based volunteer program.
Today, Bankers without Borders (BwB) has joined with the Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO) to announce a new collaboration to support microfinance and microenterprise development organizations in the United States. This alliance will enable more than 400 organizations to benefit from the skills and experience of our more than 6,300 highly skilled active and retired business professionals in BwB’s global volunteer reserve corps.
We are currently recruiting for our first project to support AEO and its members. BwB is seeking a team of volunteers to refine and develop a toolkit that will enable microfinance and microenterprise organizations to better meet the needs of their existing clients and reach individuals presently not served. For more details or to apply, please visit the Bankers without Borders website.
Once the toolkit is developed and piloted, we anticipate opportunities for other volunteers to work with microenterprise organizations to conduct a market assessment using the framework designed through this first volunteer project.
AEO's new report talks about the job-creating power of microenterprises.
In conjunction with today’s announcement, AEO released a report on the state of the microenterprise sector in the United States. The report, “The Power of One in Three,” frames the powerful role that the microenterprise sector can play in helping the American economy recover and create jobs. As suggested by the study’s title, the findings demonstrate that if one in three microenterprises hired just oneemployee, the U.S. economy could reach full employment. For more information on AEO, please visit www.aeoworks.org.
We believe BwB’s volunteers are some of the best and brightest minds in the corporate sector. For those of you who are U.S. residents, this partnership presents a unique opportunity to help make a difference, both locally and globally. Stay tuned as we keep you informed of opportunities to engage through this new alliance.
Barbara Weber, who worked at Grameen Foundation from 2002 to 2006, was a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar in Bangladesh and is now working on her Ph.D. in depth psychology.
Bangladesh went from being dubbed the world’s basket case in 1973 by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to becoming a beacon of development innovation that the rest of the world has since sought to emulate, thanks in large measure to its pioneering in microfinance. This renown is fast turning to infamy, however, as political vendetta cannibalizes the very source of the nation’s well-deserved pride.
The country’s acclaim reached a crescendo in 2006, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Grameen Bank and its founder, Professor Muhammad Yunus, for creating a system that has enabled the poor to pull themselves up by their boot straps. It has done this so effectively that its microfinance model has been studied exhaustively and replicated around the world.
What ensued next seems to have won Yunus the ire of the current prime minister, Sheikh Hasina. In 2007, the newly ordained Nobel laureate made a fleeting and ill-fated foray into politics in a vacuum that was created when a military-backed interim government began jailing operatives of the country’s top political parties. Sheikh Hasina herself was temporarily in exile and charged with masterminding crime.
Prof. Yunus and most of the Board directors who represent the borrower-owners of Grameen Bank tour the streets of Oslo the day before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
Some saw this as a potential turning point for a country that had topped Transparency International’s list of the most corrupt governments in the world. Bangladesh was number-one on that list for five consecutive years. But when national elections were held in 2008, Sheikh Hasina – who had held the post of prime minister from 1996 to 2001 – again took office. Now, she and her party in power seem intent on systematically dismantling Grameen Bank.
In apparent collusion with the current government, the country’s highest court recently upheld the ouster of Grameen Bank’s founder as managing director. The Supreme Court will have one more opportunity to review the case in a ruling that is due on May 2. In the meantime, Prof. Yunus remains managing director of the Bank while the world watches attentively and awaits Bangladesh’s next move.
Eric Cantor has led Grameen Foundation’s AppLab efforts in Uganda for the past three years, and continues to serve as an advisor on the project.
More than three years ago, I landed in Uganda to establish Grameen Foundation’s “Application Laboratory” – a program conceived to explore the potential of mobile phones to improve the lives of the poor. In our quest to test, develop and expand mobile services that are useful for the most often-ignored people on the planet, our team spent (and spends) extensive time talking to our users, in the places they work and live, to hear about the good and the bad of the methods we are testing to empower them.
We sit under the mango tree at the rural health clinic, hearing about how people learn to avoid and treat common and devastating diseases like malaria and HIV. We walk the banana plantations of farmers in the West, trying to gauge how they can best control banana wilt, using locally available resources and techniques. We observe the effects of the rapidly growing “mobile money” phenomenon – essentially digital currency delivered through a mobile phone network – and assess how it can improve the lives of villagers. We see how people interact with the Internet and other unfamiliar services available through the few laptops and smartphones in a community. And we listen to farming groups, led by Community Knowledge Workers (CKWs), as they plan and prepare to bulk their crops for sale to the highest-paying buyers. As white winter washes over the US, and the rains wind down and planting season approaches in Uganda, we share some lessons learned through this work in the hopes that our growing body of work, as well as that of other practitioners in this field, will benefit.
In AppLab’s early work, we tested a number of information services, leading up to our launch, with MTN (one of the primary mobile phone services providers in east Africa) and Google, of Google SMS Tips, the product that won the award for “Best use of Mobile for Social and Economic Development” at the 2010 GSM Mobile World Congress. It was rewarding to sit on a farm and hear how making organic pesticides using local chemicals or even waste products found on the farm helped save a farmer money, and increase her yields and incomes.
Community Knowledge Workers act as valuable local intermediaries, bridging the "last kilometer" to bring essential information to other rural farmers in Uganda. Here, a CKW uses her high-end mobile phone to check for information on banana wilt.
But what became quickly apparent was that information alone is not a complete solution. A reference pointer or a tip about maternal health techniques may be useful to an expectant mother, but creating deep, impactful behavior change – what information-driven development initiatives seek – requires a context in which that information has a value. People certainly have a hunger for knowledge and a willingness to embrace the mobile phone to search for answers, as shown by all the questions they asked from the beginning about family planning, and HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, which affect them directly and for which few reliable, anonymous sources are available. But we require several things to make this information actionable and impactful: specific information, a context in which to make it useful, and relevant services and resources.
