Electricity has the potential for drastically improving the lives of the rural poor. It can provide light, a substitute for back-breaking human effort and opens up new opportunities to earn income that were unthinkable before. It is safer, far more convenient, and cheaper than burning kerosene, and if generated from "renewable" sources, it is cleaner.
To economise the cost of kerosene, many poor women tend to keep the wick of the lamp as low as they possibly can while sewing, craft making, or processing agricultural produce, until late at night, causing long-term damage to their eyes. Their children while doing the school homework at night follow the same practice. Availability of electricity prevents such health hazards.
Since 1994, the Bank has been looking for various ways to provide electrical energy to the homes of its borrowers in the unelectrified villages of Bangladesh. Finally, in 1996, a new not-for-profit company called ‘Grameen Shakti’ was added to the Grameen conglomerate with the purpose to develop and sell non-polluting, renewable solar photo-voltaic, biogas, and wind turbine energy systems.
Since then, Grameen Shakti started its solar demonstration project with the installation of 32 solar household systems in six villages, installed two small wind turbine in the coastal region of Bangladesh, and built several biogas digesters.
It is expected that soon Grameen borrowers who have already paid their housing loans would be able to borrow to purchase solar energy system or connect to the local renewable energy grid.
4.2 Telephone Service
While each and every Grameen house is not expected to acquire a telephone connection in any foreseeable future, Grameen Telecom together with the lending programme of the Grameen Bank is in the process of providing one GSM cellular mobile telephone in each of Bangladesh’s 68,000 villages. The "telephone lady" of the village sells telephone service to her fellow villagers thus connecting the "unconnected" millions to the rest of the world, while generating income for herself. Appendix H contains an article on this which originally appeared in ‘Los Angeles Times’ and was reprinted in ‘Australian’ on 18 November 1997.
4.3 Scaling up of Grameen Housing Programme
As mentioned earlier (Note 2 in Section 2), the Grameen Bank aims to provide housing loans to around one million borrowers in the next five years. This would require around half a billion dollars to be committed in long-term (7 to 10 years) loans. Given that the home loans are made at 8%, the wholesale funds at 3% would be needed.
It is not clear to us where this money will come from. Our dialogue with the Deputy Managing Director of the Bank has left us with an impression that they have yet to find a suitable source for these funds.
A suggestion put forward by a member of Grameen Bank Support Group (Australia) is to invite the public in Australia, UK, etc. to buy house in rural Bangladesh and lease them to Grameen Bank borrowers who will buy it back from the owners in weekly instalments, including interest, over 7 to 10 years. In addition to the ownership papers, the investors will receive a photo of the house and a photo of the tenant family. For an Australian or a British investor, a $500 investment property in Bangladesh is very affordable. It will also generate tremendous sense of participation. For Grameen Support Groups, finding one million such investors in Northern countries is not hard. However, the inconvertibility of Bangladeshi taka and the risk of relative currency movement are the major impediment to this scheme.
An alternative is to find institutional donors/lenders who are willing to lend a total of half a billion dollars to the Grameen Bank at 3%.
