Decided to ask my mom if she knew about Grameen Bank. Apparently she did and had quite a lot to say, here’s a summary/list of her comments (in the order she mentioned them):
- dude is not as great a guy as he seems, i (she) hate(s) him
- if you couldn’t pay on the loans he would take animals (goats and cows) and other stuff
- I’m not fact checking any of this rn, but I did notice on the wikipedia page it said no collateral. my mom said you couldn’t declare bankruptcy or whatever for his loans. you had to pay them back one way or another. so while animals or whatever little bits of property were not strictly collateral they were probably sold “independently” to pay off the loans
- women did get more loans, thats true. they were better at paying them back.
- started getting into politics
- commented about deep state stuff (again no fact checking rn)
- in summary: Muhammad Yunus was put into power because of a political events with students in Bangladesh. The United States put him into power because the previous person in power was not giving them access to certain land/ocean(?) that would be helpful in strategizing against China and India. They influenced Bangladeshi politics to get who they wanted in charge to do what they want.
- commented about deep state stuff (again no fact checking rn)
- my mom was in the country at the time when he was growing and she believed personally that the interest rates were quite high (100 “dollars” given, 150 “dollars” asked for back)
- the people who are taking these loans are not educated and were exploited. loan terms were either lied about/uneducated people were taken advantage of a bit because they don’t really understand the loan terms. numbers/math hard
- but he did earn Bangladesh worldwide recognition for his microlending (and i think she overall thought it helped)
- for example, a good is the jobs created by the banks and how students would get jobs there
- started complaining about corruption in NGOs