Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

by Muhammad Yunus

One of those members, a frightened-looking woman in her early forties, spoke only Spanish. I told her, “These are beautiful quilts and embroidered designs you make. When did you think of starting a business with this?” Through an interpreter she explained her life to me in great detail: “When Jenny [a staff member of the WSEP] came and talked to me, I was scared. I thought she is going to try to sell me something. I avoided her. She came back another time with another woman, a Hispanic woman from the neighborhood. They tried to talk to me, but I was still too afraid to listen. They were talking about business. I had no understanding of business. My husband has a hard life. He works in a factory. He gets very angry if I ever try talking to outsiders. He does not like me to leave the apartment by myself. I didn’t know anybody in Chicago. I had been living here with my husband for the past fifteen years since I came from Mexico. “Jenny kept coming back. She told me about the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh—a faraway country. She told me how women in that country changed their lives. I liked the stories she told me, and I wished I could be like the women in that country. But here things were so rough. I did not dare do anything by myself. My husband would kill me if I created trouble for him. “I started talking to Jenny. She introduced me to other women in the neighborhood. I listened to them. They told me about their hard lives, about their children, about their husbands, about th...