Credit for Alleviation of Rural Poverty: The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh

摘要

The Grameen Bank is an innovative and extraordinarily successful institution in Bangladesh. Begun in 1976 as an action-research project, it was established by a 1983 government ordinance as a bank for the exclusive purpose of providing credit without collateral to the rural poor to enable them to generate self-employment. Women have taken particular advantage of this opportunity to expand the scale of their traditional activities, such as food processing and livestock raising. The highly structured credit program includes close supervision by bank workers of loan proposals and repayment, and of a complete social development plan -- for housing, sanitation, diet, education, hard work, mutual responsibility, etc. -- that borrowers are pledged to follow. The cost of the loan fund is subsidized by loans from that International Fund for Agricultural Development. Because of the close supervision of borrowers and an expensive training program for bank employees, operating costs are high. But loan repayment performance is excellent, which is unusual for rural development credit programs in low-income countries.