14 December 2014 TWENTY-TWO CENTS: MUHAMMAD YUNUS AND THE VILLAGE BANK by Paula Yoo and Jamel Akib, ill., Lee & Low, September 2014, 40p., ISBN: 978-1-60060-658-8

“We can change the world

Rearrange the world”

-- Graham Nash, “Chicago”

“Muhammad realized that Sufiya’s life depended on just a few cents a day. He reached into his pocket. It jingled with many coins. He could easily give Sufiya the twenty-two cents she needed to buy more bamboo. Then she wouldn’t owe the mahajon [loan shark] anything and could keep all the profits for herself.

“But Muhammad hesitated. If he gave Sufiya the money, she would always be dependent on strangers for charity. Giving her the twenty-two cents would not solve her problems in the long run. He needed to figure out a way to help Sufiya and others in her situation break out of the cycle of poverty.”

No real bank can afford to have its executives spend time making pocket-change loans to poor people. Right?

That’s what most educated adults would reckon. But Muhammad Yunus saw things differently.

Muhammad Yunus grew up learning compassion by watching his parents perform acts of charity and by participating in Boy Scout community service projects, The son of uneducated parents colonial India’s Bengal region. Muhammad was a good student who attended college to study economics, thinking that it would “teach him how to help the poor manage and save their money better.”

Yunus subsequently landed a Fulbright scholarship and a job teaching in a U.S. university. After the 1971 war that led to Bangladesh independence, he felt compelled to return home.

As the head of the economics department at Chittagong University, Yunus and his students encountered Sufiya Begum and other impoverished women who needed small loans to create sustainable lives.  The banks would have nothing to do with them, so Muhammad Yunus decided to start his own bank to help these poor people.

“In 1977 he launched Grameen Bank, which means ‘village bank’ in the Bangla language of Bangladesh.” He developed a procedure through which a number of poor loan seekers would become a support system for one another.

Muhammad Yunus’s system worked. By 2006, when he and the bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their good work, this “banker to the poor” had changed lives by lending more than ten billion U.S. dollars to millions of people around the world.

It’s inspiring to read about someone who saw a problem, identified it, and came up with a brand new solution rather than just accepting things the way they were. As a child and adolescent, I occasionally read books that caused me to see things differently, books that changed my life.  Investing ten or fifteen minutes in reading TWENTY-TWO CENTS could well have a similar effect on many of today’s young people.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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