Olaolu Olusina And James Emejo
24 August 2008
Lagos — Nobel Laureate and acclaimed 'Banker to the Poor', Professor Muhammad Yunus, yesterday in Lagos said government's quest to eradicate poverty in Nigeria can only be realised with a review of the current microfinance policy in the country.
He therefore called on the Nigerian authorities and stakeholders in the microfinance sector to redesign their institutions and concept of business to create a society without poverty. He said social business remains the best way of eradicating the scourge from the society.
The US-trained Bangl-adeshi economist, who was the guest speaker at a microfinancing conference organised by Tradewise Speaker Bureau and Consulting Limited in collaboration with the Lagos State government, said poverty is not created by the poor but by the system. He said "micro-credit is all about helping people get out of poverty."
Yunus said it makes sense to lend to the poor rather than the rich and wealthy, pointing out that the experience in Bangladesh is a pointer to the fact that the poor would always pay back.
"Poverty is not created by the poor people, it is created by the system." "We can create a world where nobody would be poor and that day we can create a poverty museum," Yunus said.
According to Yunus, "We need to open a new kind of business, a social business, doing it not to make money but to impact on other people's lives. "We are doing this in Bangladesh and it is working."
He said his experience showed that loan shops at the period refused to help the poor and where they did, they attached high interest rates that caused pains to the borrowers.
He said the poor have been found to be faithful in paying back their loans, contrary to claims by some financial institutions. He emphasised the need to redesign the financial institutions to make them more responsive to the needs of the poor.
The pro-poor advocate and founder of the Gra-meen Bank in Bangladesh therefore called on stakeholders to change their attitude of seeing business as a money-making exercise , saying "human being is not a money-making machine but a multi-dimensional being."
Yunus explained how he started what later became the Grameen Bank with only $27 seed fund to about 42 indigent Bangladeshi women, saying "all the good things that are happening in Bangladesh and Grameen today are simply because of the decisions we took in the beginning."
According to Yunus, "The Grameen Bank that you hear about today is not only for the poor but owned by the poor women of Bangladesh," adding "we lend over a billion dollars a year and it is the decision of the poor women who sit on the Board of the Bank."
The Nobel Laureate stated that currently the Grameen Bank has 7.5million borrowers, most of them women, pointing out that it is the policy of the bank that women must always be given preference with loans. This , he said , was based on his belief that "money that goes into the family through women creates more value in that family than the one that came in through men."
Earlier in his welcome address, Managing Director, Tradewise Consulting , Mr. Dayo Omotayo, described Yunus as the 'man of the moment' as he lauded his(Yunus) revolutionary approach to poverty eradication. "We have not brought Professor Yunus here for the camaraderie but we have brought him here in order to learn from him," Omotayo said.
Lagos State Governor, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola , in his keynote address, said the emphasis his administration is placing on microfinancing was influenced by his reading of Yunus' exploits in Bangladesh.
Minister of State for Finance , Mr. Remi Babalola, and Deputy Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria(CBN), Mr. Tunde Lemo, also praised Yunus for his experiment that has been replicated in over 100 countries across the world , as they challenged the 800 microfinance banks in the country to learn from the Nobel Laureate.
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