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Misha Glenny

Banking on Change: Microcredit and Community Organizing in India

Banking on Change: Microcredit and Community Organizing in India

J. S. Parthiban might be the only banker whose office comes equipped with a kickstand. A native of Tamil Nadu, India's southernmost state, Parthiban makes microloans to local communities, all from the back of his small, black Hero Honda motorcycle.
Microcredit, an approach to poverty alleviation that's seen significant success in India, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, involves making small loans to people—mainly women—who have no access to traditional credit so they may start local businesses. Microcredit's success is tied, in part, to its emphasis on community, cooperation, and person-to-person relationships, all keys to vibrant local economies.
"When you begin a new venture, don't think only of yourself and your family. It should benefit the community, the village, and the entire surroundings," says Parthiban, whose work shows that community-based banking has little in common with the risky financial speculation that contributed to the current recession.
To Parthiban, solving problems, including economic ones, is ultimately about cultivating healthy communities. Changing broken systems is important, he agrees, but the real work is with people: "If you help them change their attitude toward life—what they are doing, why they are doing, how they can be—if you can help them find an answer to all these things, I think we have found an answer to all the big headlines in the newspapers."

Markets

The price pattern reminds you that every movement of importance is but a repetition of similar price movements, that just as soon as you can familiarize yourself with the actions of the past, you will be able to anticipate and act correctly and profitably upon forthcoming movements. —Jesse Livermore

Venture-Capital Firms Caught in a Shakeout - WSJ.com

Venture-Capital Firms Caught in a Shakeout - WSJ.com

The technology bubble popped a decade ago, but the venture-capital industry that helped finance the boom stayed largely intact. Now venture-capital firms are going through their own brutal culling.

Venture firms are struggling to raise new cash, hampered by poor investment returns and a difficult economy. Last year, 125 venture funds in the U.S. collected $13.6 billion, down from 203 funds that raised $28.7 billion in 2008 and down from 217 funds that raised $40.8 billion in 2007, according to data tracker VentureSource.

Business.view: Wominnovation | The Economist

Business.view: Wominnovation | The Economist

TWO recent innovations have garnered a lot of attention for the way they empower women. One is microcredit, a system of lending to very poor people, the majority of whom are female microentrepreneurs who are thus helped to climb out of poverty. The other is the mobile phone, which among other things has led to the emergence of an army of “telephone ladies” in countries such as Bangladesh, who earn a decent living by buying a phone and renting it out to other villagers.

That said, some innovations have been harmful to women, especially in the developing world. As the cover story of the latest issue of The Economist points out, at least 100m female lives have been lost in recent decades due to “gendercide” in countries such as China, where the number of live male births recorded enormously exceeds the number of live female births. One factor in this has been new technology that allows parents to determine their embryo’s sex early in a pregnancy—and thus to abort females in countries where male offspring are valued more highly. Other innovations also bring more benefits to men than women. For example, women are estimated to be only 25% of internet users in Africa, 22% in Asia, 38% in Latin America and just 6% in the Middle East.

“How can we harness innovation’s power to empower women and promote greater gender equality?” asks a new study by the International Centre for Research on Women. Its authors try to answer this question first by examining eight inventions that they say have helped women dramatically, including village mobile phones and microcredit.

Another example is the birth-control pill: there is a strong case to be made that it has brought more benefits for women than any other invention, although the report does not attempt such a ranking. The automatic washing-machine might give it a close run in countries where it is commonplace, by freeing women from an activity that used to take many hours a week. Instead of studying that, the report instead considers a number of “social innovations”, ranging from land titling in Peru to the successful anti-foot-binding campaign in China, that the authors say have had a massive beneficial impact.

Simple

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

- Edward Abbey, writer, essayist, novelist (1927-1989).