froginmythroat (FIMT)

The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded two weeks ago to the Bangladeshi Muhammad Yunus and his organisation Grameen Bank. I am connected to this because of the work I am doing for Grameen Foundation, an organisation that grew out of the work of the Grameen Bank, was founded by Yunus and on whose board he currently sits.

Yunus with wife to the left, and daughter to the right too busy texting to look at the cameras. Nice phone.

Yunus received the prize for his outstanding vision, action, models, and ideas which have contributed to the reduction of poverty in Bangladesh, and through the work of the many organisations he has inspired, throughout the world . He believes that poverty is an artificial creation and his vision is to “put poverty in a museum”.

I remember Bangladesh being that country in secondary school social studies had something like only 5 TV per 1000 households. Now it has 10 TVs per 1000 households and 1 Nobel Peace Prize winner – that’s 965 TVs per 1000 households less than New Zealand and 1 Nobel Peace Prize winner more.

Yunus’s tool for poverty obliteration is microcredit – the provision of financial services, primarly loans without collateral, to the poor. He has demonstrated that with access to credit, the poor can and do repay their loans and grow their small businesses, be it raising chickens, making handicrafts, trading rice, baking cakes, or selling gasoline.

My connection to all this is that via Grameen Foundation I am working for a microfinance organisation that does what the Grameen Bank does in the Philippines. I am helping them improve their organisation effectiveness through the implementation of a computerised information system. The type of work I’m doing could equally apply to any organisation in the world, but for some reason I find working here more “meaningful”. Somehow the idea of making the poorer less poor, and being a small cog in the enterprise of correcting world inequality is motivating.

But if you want to be more than just a cog in the wheel, here is my guide for wining the Nobel Peace Prize:

1. Start small, early. Go for the Citizenship prize at school.

2. Have a huge vision – like eradicating worldwide poverty

3. Be able to build and grow an organization – no easy task. Yunus grew his business from an informal loan of $27 for a couple of people loan in 1974 to over $5 billion in loans disbursed to over 6 million members.

4.Don’t be discouraged by the mediocre masses. In Banda Aceh I worked with Mr. S.M Ahsan Habib, a man who has worked with Grameen Bank for 22 years. Grameen Bank won the other half of the Nobel Peace Prize. As a Branch Manager, among other things, he had to put up with physical assault as part of the job. Often when starting in a new village, the husband’s of the borrowers would violently object to their wives taking loans. Habib had been beaten and thrown into a river on more than 1 occassion. Resistance to Yunus’s vision was huge, not only from traditional cultural elements on the ground but also conservatives in the Bangladeshi government.

5. If all else fails, wine and dine the retired Norweign ministers and other esteemed white guys who make up the Norweign Nobel Committee. Slip them a fiddy.