Saturday, December 17, 2005

Micro Development

Muhammad Yunus: Microcredit Missionary

It is hard not to love the genius behind the Grameen Project. Just $27 started one of the most influential and successful development projects around. And it was a bottom-up approach, not top-down involving massive meetings, huge ceremonies and that resulted in grad visions that could never be implemented.

Grameen is microcredit where the most desperately poor in the world can borrow money to start their own businesses. The genius is that it doesn’t pretend to have all the answers and tell people how to be saved from poverty, it just gives them a couple of dollars and lets them figure it out for themselves. Genius.

Why do I bring this up here? I guess it is related to my earlier post that a few clever clever ideas and a couple of innovative business models have potential to alleviate some of the suffering in the world.

And the IT industry is good at coming up with clever ideas and innovative business models, right?

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