monday dc opera with monica (dr yunus dughter
and co-founder www.singforhope.org
tuesday clinton global initiative:
Special Session:
Profiting from the Poor? A Discussion on Microfinance IPOs
Microfinance now brings over 150 million people access to financial services. What
was once led by the nonprofit sector is increasingly linked to mainstream financial markets offering investors a range of
ways to participate – through debt, equity, and other specialized instruments. This link has led many to question: are
microfinance institutions (MFIs) and wealthy investors profiting from the poor? There is continued controversy over the level
at which interest rates become exploitative; and now, with the public offering of a third MFI—SKS Microfinance—the
question arises over appropriate means to raise microfinance capital. This session will provide a forum for a candid discussion
on the topic.
Participants:
Vikram
Akula, Founder and Chairperson, SKS
Microfinance Ltd Adam Davidson, Co-Founder
and Co-Host, NPR’s Planet Money http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/ Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President
and Chief Executive Officer, Women’s World Banking Muhammad
Yunus, Founder and Managing Director, Grameen
Bank
NY conference, which is being hosted by Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan for the Millennium
Development Goals for women and children.
US First Lady Michelle Obama and former US First Ladies Hillary Clinton and Laura
Bush will also be attending the Clinton conference.
The other attendees are Haiti Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive;
Liberia President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf; Cherie Blair of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women; Virgin Group chairman Richard
Branson; Cisco chairman John Chambers; Avon chairman Andrea Jung; Melinda Gates; Coca-Cola chairman Muhtar Kent; Alcoa chairman
Klaus Kleinfeld; Procter and Gamble president Robert McDonald; Google chairman Eric Schmidt; Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata;
Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang; and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus.
Scotland hosts Yunus and microeconomics Interdependence Day
2010 June 29 7th decade wishmaking day- 2010s most exciting decade - happy 70th Yunus Birthday - yunus new book's top 8 colabortion gols rsvp info@worldcitizen.tv with nominations of top 10 collaboration networks per goal
1.1a world without a single person living in poverty 2.1a world whose oceans, lakes, streams, and atmosphere are free of pollution 3.1 a world where no child goes to sleep hungry 4.1 a world where no one dies a premature death from an avoidable illness 5 a world where wars are a thing of the past 6 a world where people can travel freely across borders 7.1a world where no one is illiterate and everyone has easy access to education
through the application of the new miracle technology 8 a world where the riches of global culture are available to all
2010 June 28 Global Social Business day - what
collaborations did you plant? RSVP info@worldcitizen.tv
advance invitations for The Economists' GlobalAssembly fall remembrance
of dad & erworld
J14
J7
Monday June 28
Collaboration wishes; 2030 (see right)-2020-2015-2012
entreprenons now! how can paris-dhaka-london job create by 2012; will beiding London's curve help Yes Me Must turn DC-NY; how can 50 countries microbanks celebrate
queen sofia's 18 month journey from nairobi to Valladolid
3 End hunger 4 End premature death
and ever higher cost of health 5 End wars and govs that spend 20% of the peoples on arms 6 End borders as barriers
to webs of people mobilising productivity 7 End college-less children and universities without job creating microentrepreneurs
14 DC book talk Robert H Smith Business School at Reagan Center DC
M3
A26
A19
A22 danone 3000 paris –must go
A12
A5
Kenya MCS
Kenya MCS
Kenya MCSto Sat 10
M29
M22 India Responsibility Forum will take place in Mumbai, India.
The Grameen Creative Lab, Nishith Desai Associates and HCC India have invited high-level officials, members
of government and royal families, influential members of society from India itself and abroad to take part in this unique
forum.
There, Professor Yunus will present social business, and attendees will actively discuss and develop ideas of
how to configure personal and corporate trade to be responsible for a socially just and sustainable society.
sees ganesh devy india's
most deepest gandhian and networker - eg connected with medics for reconciliation led out of Melbourne by Paul Komesaroff
and Ira by Modjtaba Sadria
F5
Paris- Quelen-SB-Lauren $TN dollar audit meetF6 fix uni camp for sb olympics event- marry yunus & drucker fans round gladius; interest
in trillion dollar writers club
To fix:Next dhaka tripNext Sam Dakey Lucknowbrochures
Around the two by 1000 yunus bookclubs my family has invested in since the end of 2007, I am looking to map
links between 100 unprofessionals - that is people who know at least 1 of the global professions well and how it as yet compounding
loss of community sustainability and job creation for youth
I first started collecting information on
this when I joined global accountant coopers and lybrand's managing consultant firm in 1989
The Scariest Profession –
1 Law
2 Media
3 Banking
4
Insurance of risk
5 Economics
6
Accounting
7 Education
8 Healthcare
9 Pension Funds
None of these
PROS' global versions sustain communities or youths future the way their monopoly rules over us currently operate in NW hemispheres.
I know some of the dirty secrets of each of these 9 professions though 2 is my specialisation and 5 is my dads network, and
through the maternal branch of my family I know the stories of how gandhi has to overturn most of english empiredom's professions
to sustain his india peoples' community rising. As Einstein who helped Gandhi predicted, the first generation to connect the
world with tech will have to go through the same micro up battle but this time in every place at the same time
Notoriously Einstein rated it odds against humanity
being able to connect itself up to higher order system than the one that ruled it, as did others including the eco-engineer
buckminster fuller with his slogan man's final examination. We would have to have robotic minds not to see that the 2010s
is our last chance to get out of this exponentially crashing mess; however the optimistic way to frame that as yunus most
exciting decade is exactly the message to global grameen brand.http://globlgrameen.com/
It would be an enormous help
even if you yourself dont want to nominate yourself as one of the unprofessionals if you can send this on to anyone who might
want to be. Its not that I want to own or coordinate this unprofessional network but I do want to be able to start to tell
dr yunus that he needs to be responsible for being in the collaborative midst of such
Nobody listened then everybody did,” he wrote in 1991 in
a future history of privatisation. He also foresaw with chilling clarity how growing life-expectancy would become a curse
and backed a ‘system of planned death' to cope with it.
But
his timing was all wrong when he wrote (circa 1975) that euthanasia would become as acceptable as abortion in 15 years; the
devil lay in the detail: as horribly skewed sex ratios show, in some countries killing of female foetuses flourishes surreptitiously
while that of old codgers is nowhere near acceptance except in a few European ones that turn a blind eye to the upsurge of
‘one-way tourism’.
He was more spot on about big company
capitalism as on biggovernment socialism. That also turned him into a technophile and an incurable optimist. Like Dr Pangloss
from Voltaire's Candide he seemed to believe in the Leibnizian mantra that “all was for the best in the best possible
of worlds” if only obdurate politicos could see it that way.
His influence can be discerned in a wide variety of works including Matt Ridley's recent opus, The Rational Optimist. Ridley
, however, is also the nonexecutive chairman of Northern Rock, the bank bailed out by government handouts during the credit
crunch. So how would Norman have handled the paradox ? “Take a lesson in how to run village businesses (like Grameen
) and how not to handle bank crises (like Japan or USA),” he wrote after a lunch with the Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus
at the Royal Automobile Club in 2008. “Learning from Dr Yunus and those who have exponentially sustained community raising
microcredit seems to be the best way forward worldwide women and US Congressmen can get.”
(Norman was no stranger to East Bengal, having studied economics there by an Indian correspondence course while waiting
to be drafted by the RAF as a teenager and his wife was the daughter of the British judge who went on from jailing Gandhi
to helping write India's Constitution in the 1940s).
His favourite
heroes were John von Neumann, the polymath who pioneered the modern computer, Game Theory and nuclear deterrence, and Albert
Einstein who once said, constancy was the virtue of idiots. It's best therefore to embrace constant change
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Share your social business leadership diaries with us - eg 2010
2010 Made my 5th trip to dhaka (october) to see dr yunus; discussed 250,000 dollars of social business
loans made by my family foundation in celebration of my dad Normn Macrae's life . Our aims hubbing social business models, replicating good news of kenya's jamii bora; sampling first issue of journal of social business to 3000 leaders of yunus choice before he testifies to congress on microcredit as lifeblood of usa expected spring 2011. Developed Consider Bangaldesh for launch at 60 person remembrance party at boardroom of The Economist Nov 16
malcolm - loved your notes on yunus- are there any more people like you south of the boirder; up in scotland we have 300
yunus fans congregating july 4; if you re ever over that way plese get in touch with yunus compatriot zasheem who has been
planting yunus type culture in glasgow for about 20 years at centre for dev
http://www.cfdscotland.co.uk/ zasheem -------------------------------------------------------------- malcolm wrote omment written by Malcolm
Harper, Steering Group of the Microfinance Club of the UK:
What have Muhammad Yunus and his work meant for me personally
? I first met him in 1987 when I was briefly in Dhaka for the Ford Foundation. The Foundation was supporting Grameen Bank;
as so often, their rather modest interventions in the early years of new initiatives have led to great things. I also visited
one or two other initiatives which had been started by foreigners, and I remember thinking, not for the first time, that donors
do much better when they identify and support good local people rather than sending in their own 'experts' (of whom I suppose
I was one, much as I hate the term !).
Then a year or so later we happened to sit next to one another at
some fatuous World Bank or similar dinner in Washington. I asked Yunus why he was not at home 'minding the store'. He replied
that the only way to develop good successors was to keep out of their way, and meetings in Washington were a relatively
harmless way of doing that. Would that all 'charismatic leaders' took the same view.
In 1991 when we were
living in Orissa my wife and I spent a few days in a Grameen Bank branch. On our way home through Dhaka Yunus asked us how
we had fared. My wife, being German and fiercely anti-military, asked him why the Centre meetings had all the saluting and
standing in rows. Yunus replied by quoting General Booth of the Salvation Army: 'Why should the devil have all the best tunes
?'.
We have met on a few occasions since then, in Bangladesh and in London, and as always I have been
amazed at Yunus' ability to be the quintessential 'nice guy', one of the nicest I have ever met, although I cannot claim to
know him at all well, and also to have a core of steel, a set of beliefs which cannot be shaken.
Great pioneers,
and Yunus is one of the greatest, sometimes find it hard to accept it when others take their ideas and modify and change then
as they 'roll them out' across the world. Schumacher of 'Small is Beautiful', Revans of 'Action Learning', are two examples;
they perhaps failed to recognise that the changes others made were also improvements. Yunus is different, at least in my opinion;
he is right to question the way in which his 'baby' has been turned into a tool whereby international investors can make millions
by exploiting the poor
I gather the day before Dr Yunus birthday has been turned into world social business day- I would welcome news of
where sustained network interactions have taken place; of those I have encountered that staged by Zahid (transparency we once
met in new york for an hour) seems to have momentum; zahid who is half Bangladeshi and half Spanish if my memory serves has
for long run some of the best virtual communities in end poverty's race; and as the ning virtual community
tool is soon charging its hosts I will be moving my relevant yunus ning content I have over to connections within zahid's www.businessfightspoverty.org
It has made yunus social business day front page with these experienced testimonies catching the eye
, well mine!
Comment
written by Andrew Mitchell MP, Secretary of State for International Development, UK:
It is thanks in no
small part to the extraordinary and unstinting efforts of innovators such as Muhammad Yunus, with whom I spent time in Bangladesh,
that microfinance has, over the past 30 years, proved to be such a powerful tool in providing formal, reliable and secure
financial services to the poor in developing countries.
There is little doubt that, for poor households, access
to financial services such as savings, credit and insurance are vital tools for poverty reduction.
Access to financial
services enables people to better withstand shocks, build assets to improve their livelihoods and pay for basic services such
as health care and education. DFID has been a longstanding advocate of microfinance and has been supporting microfinance and
financial sector development in many of its country programmes across the world for many years.
However, an estimated
2.7 billion people in developing countries still do not have access to formal financial services. It is vitally important
that the key challenge of how to reach such an enormous number of people as quickly as possible is tackled with due urgency.
To take the pioneering work of Mohammad Yunus forward we must start to investigate approaches to new frontiers in
banking, working beyond traditional models to reach the poor.
Branchless banking is the provision of banking services
without relying on a building to host the services. It is still only at an early stage of development but it has the power
to transform banking for the good of the poor
Comment written by Malcolm Harper, Steering Group of the
Microfinance Club of the UK:
What have Muhammad Yunus and his work meant for me personally ? I first met
him in 1987 when I was briefly in Dhaka for the Ford Foundation. The Foundation was supporting Grameen Bank; as so often,
their rather modest interventions in the early years of new initiatives have led to great things. I also visited one
or two other initiatives which had been started by foreigners, and I remember thinking, not for the first time, that
donors do much better when they identify and support good local people rather than sending in their own 'experts' (of
whom I suppose I was one, much as I hate the term !).
Then a year or so later we happened to sit next to
one another at some fatuous World Bank or similar dinner in Washington. I asked Yunus why he was not at home 'minding
the store'. He replied that the only way to develop good successors was to keep out of their way, and meetings in Washington
were a relatively harmless way of doing that. Would that all 'charismatic leaders' took the same view.
In 1991 when we were living in Orissa my wife and I spent a few days in a Grameen Bank branch. On our way home through Dhaka Yunus
asked us how we had fared. My wife, being German and fiercely anti-military, asked him why the Centre meetings had all
the saluting and standing in rows. Yunus replied by quoting General Booth of the Salvation Army: 'Why should the devil
have all the best tunes ?'.
We have met on a few occasions since then, in Bangladesh and in London,
and as always I have been amazed at Yunus' ability to be the quintessential 'nice guy', one of the nicest I have ever met,
although I cannot claim to know him at all well, and also to have a core of steel, a set of beliefs which cannot be shaken.
Great pioneers, and Yunus is one of the greatest, sometimes find it hard to accept it when others take their
ideas and modify and change then as they 'roll them out' across the world. Schumacher of 'Small is Beautiful', Revans of 'Action
Learning', are two examples; they perhaps failed to recognise that the changes others made were also improvements. Yunus is
different, at least in my opinion; he is right to question the way in which his 'baby' has been turned into a tool whereby
international investors can make millions by exploiting the poor.
Comment written by William Derban, Head of Community
Relations, Barclays Africa:
For anyone who has ventured into the world of microfinance, one name stands
out – Prof. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank. As a student, I had read a lot on microfinance and the Grameen
Bank, but it was after I read Banker to the Poor, the autobiography of Muhammad Yunus, that I began to really appreciate what
he had achieved, not only for the people of Chittagong and Bangladesh, but for the world as a whole. Meeting him in London
a couple of years ago and hearing him speak on social entrepreneurship was a great honour for me. Muhammad Yunus’s life
and achievements have inspired me in two main ways.
Firstly, I admire the way he applied theory to practice and
found solutions to the pressing needs of his people by simply identifying with them and understanding their problems. Not
relying on external insights, nor waiting on the results from an extended piece of research, but based on his discussions
with a group of women in the village, he devised and implemented a strategy that was suitable for them and that went on to
benefit many others. In this way, Muhammad Yunus demonstrated that solutions to the many issues that surround us are often
closer than we think. For instance, the onus is often on formal sector institutions to change their ways of working to accommodate
the poor, who largely make up the informal sector, rather than vice versa. This is especially important in countries where
the informal sector forms the majority.
Secondly, Muhammad Yunus showed that providing financial services to the
poor was possible. He demonstrated that the poor could repay loans; they could save, and, through accessing appropriate financial
services, could lift themselves out of poverty. For me, the real revolution that he started was much more than establishing
the Grameen model. By applying the simple idea of customer centricity, a common concept in banks, to the poor, he clearly
defined the poor as customers, rather than beneficiaries of aid, and allowed them to show him what solutions suited them.
The Grameen model may not work in every part of the world, but the ethos of self-help, and of finding answers from the bottom
up, will encourage the development of other indigenous and traditional models.
At Barclays, our work in financial
inclusion in Africa has certainly been influenced by the idea that the best methods to promote financial inclusion among the
unbanked are those that are rooted in indigenous and traditional models. Our successful support for susu collectors in Ghana
and Village Savings and Savings Associations in many communities in Africa are a testament to the great work started by Muhammad
Yunus.
