Appendix A
Grameen Family of Companies
Grameen Bank A for-profit bank. Specialises in collateral-free credit and other financial services for the "poorest of the poor". Housing loan is one of the dozen or so loan products. Grameen Krishi ("Agriculture") Foundation A for-profit company like the Grameen Bank. Works with farmers who are very poor but not the "poorest of the poor". Unlike the Bank that deals only in cash, the Krishi Foundation lends and accepts repayments in cash as well as in agricultural input and produce. Profit is plowed back into the Foundation: in sinking tubewells, building agricultural infrastructure, undertaking agricultural research, and other "future building" activities. Grameen Uddog A not-for-profit company. Works with more than 10,000 hand-loom weavers who are some of the poorest people in Bangladesh. Organises these individual village-based weavers into a large quality-controlled business which exports more than one million yards of hand-loomed cotton ‘check’ fabric a month. Grameen Motsho ("Fisheries") Foundation A not-for-profit company. Works with extremely poor people. Operates 500 hectares of fish farms and 140 hectares of shrimp farms as well as 20 fish seed multiplication farms. GMF is a very high return on investment. Rapid eradication of poverty is the primary corporate mission. Grameen Fund A not-for-profit company. Provides finance to ventures that are risky, technology-oriented, and deprived of credit from formal financial institutions because the poor entrepreneurs are deemed not credit-worthy. The work of the Grameen Fund is turning out to be a big leap in Grameen’s poverty eradication mission. Grameen Kalyan ("Rural Welfare") A not-for-profit company. Provides "welfare" to Grameen Bank staff and clients in the area of education, health and disaster relief, as well as credit to employees. Grameen Shamogree ("Rural Products") A for-profit company. Finances rural industries and market their products, specially those produced in labour-intensive industries, in Bangladesh and overseas. The company is also attempting to save traditional Bangladeshi crafts that are at the risk of being lost because of chronic shortage of employment and capital. Grameen Telecom A recently launched for-profit company. Dedicated to bringing the information revolution to the rural people of Bangladesh. Over the next 4 years, will provide GSM mobile phone service to 100 million rural inhabitants in 68,000 villages by financing 60,000 Grameen borrowers to provide village pay phone service as well as mobile phones for individual use to the rich segment of the Bangladeshi rural society. Grameen Shakti ("Energy") A recently launched not-for-profit rural power company. Aims to develop non-polluting renewable energy including solar, bio-gas and wind turbine, for non-electrified villages of Bangladesh. Grameen Cybernet Limited A recently launched and highly profitable for-profit company. Dedicated in bringing the latest in information technology including Internet to the cities and villages of Bangladesh. Grameen Communications A not-for-profit company. Is committed to increasing awareness and promoting the use of information available on Internet for improving education, health, sanitation, and research. Take Internet to the poorest of the poor. Grameen Trust A not-for-profit Trust. Provides finance, training, and technical assistance to people all over the world, including UK, who wish to "replicate" the Grameen Bank model. At present, there are over 200 ‘Grameen Bank replications’ in 56 countries. The Trust aims to help create 300 new replications in the next five years. Grameen Bank was incorporated in 1983. The rest has been accomplished in the last 8 years (1989-1997) with most of the capital raised from Bangladeshi and foreign depositors, interest earnings, borrowers’ savings, sale of bonds, and by wealth creation through trading - in a country which is so poor, overpopulated, and vulnerable that it was dubbed the ‘Fifth World’ and ‘world’s basketcase’. It is certain that many new companies will be added to the Grameen conglomerate - intensifying their collective, concerted assault on structured poverty. Already there are many ideas on the table: an export-oriented company exploiting tissue culture to compete for international markets in cut flowers, a dairy processing company to create and service the presently non-existing domestic market for pasteurised packaged fresh milk, an educational foundation to formalise the work currently embedded within the Bank, and so on. The authors of this report feel that what we are seeing here is not a one-off miracle but a highly replicable model, that can be and, in fact, is being (see Note 1) adapted to the local conditions in many different countries and regions, enabling the poor to create wealth - individually and collectively - and undertake community and institution building in a way that suits them. We feel that it is very important to dispel the perception that Professor Yunus and other co-founders of the Grameen conglomerate are somehow "very special" or the poor in Bangladesh are "different" or the macro-economic and policy climate in Bangladesh is conducive for the empowerment of the poor. On the contrary, in 1976 when Dr. Muhammad Yunus and his students initiated their action-research project, Yunus had been only 5 years in the workforce. He, his students, and his fellow academics who now lead the Grameen conglomerate, had no previous experience in ‘development’, business, banking, or even action-research. Bangladesh, although making some progress, is still a pathetically mismanaged country with rampant corruption (see Note 2); the vast majority of officials and elite in Bangladesh show a shocking indifference towards their poor. If anything, Bangladesh is the acid test. Access to credit at reasonable terms, we believe, will unleash the productive potential of the poor everywhere.
Notes: The latest example of this is CARD (Centre for Agricultural and Rural Development) in Philippines. CARD started its life as an aid and development agency in April 1988, working primarily with landless coconut workers. In 1990, it began to receive funding and institutional support from the Grameen Trust and started experimenting with the Grameen model and customising it to unique local conditions. As at May 1997, CARD had extended loans in excess of 90 million pesos with an impressive repayment rate of 99.68% (quite comparable to that of the Grameen Bank). In September 1997, CARD started functioning as a proper bank with branches in Laguna, Quezon, Marinduque, and Masbate provinces. Back to text See Appendix C (‘Participation As Process, Process As Growth, What Can We Learn From Grameen Bank’ page 2) Back to text