I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there were 42 names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was shocked.
I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in which I was working in Bangladesh.
I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.
Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women.
They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.
I wanted to give money to people like this woman so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell their product at the price which the markets gave them — which was much higher than what the trader was giving them.
