what do net generation producers of the future most need to understand about grameen bank?

[chris macrae]

I dont remember a time that I have felt sadder at a celebration occasion than the 2011 global microcreidt conference. I dont believe any ordinary person (virgin to this conference circus) attending that summit would have learnt anything real that mattered about gramen bank -and of cousre it is because even the greatest milennuim goal network of 15 year duration couldnt issue uptodate curricula of action learning on grameen that the whole chattering classes turned on microfinance-it was so easy for big banks and one or tow national despots to fuel this misinformation

 

what they were turning on wasst the original bangladesh modesl - its was the fake microfinances sponsored by big banks. Of cousre this shows that even if you dearly wish to open source the franchsie that can help more people add to their productive lifetimes than ever before, you need some quality control to ensure others dont take over the dissemination of the knowledge

 

so i have concluded what the world needs now is www.microeducationsummit.com - it would be huge if we could design a MOOC of how brac and grameen really worked over last 40 years

 

there is one really good book on grameen that I have only just found and interestingly it explains how grameen energy evolved since 1996

 

grameen has in effect gone through 3 stages

 

1976-1995 - where rural meant no telecommunarions not even the lanlines that some of us have used during alexander bell's century, no energy beyond kerosene, no other infrastructure that most of us in developed world take for granted  (the last mile of many vilages cant even be travelled by ricksaw -single person bicycyle/pedestrian tracks being all there is-

 

in this world tyhe grameen model was not about banking per se- it was about the convergence og banking, extremely local community markets and knowledge hubs - one centre for each of 60 pooerst mothers (whose united investment was in all their children's progress).

 

in 1996 yunus got a free loan from george soros to be the first person to launch a mobile teleeom in a nations villages before its capitals- naturally this led to the most life-critical information expereemnts ever conected. today yunus has moved on from one telephone mother per hub of 60 member,s to mobile nurses whom he is training as fast as he possibly can selecting the most passionately driven vilage girls to graduate from grameen secondary scholarships. This colaboration movement to end nursevilages promises the most economica transformation any healthcare system has ever seen - at lest since the NHS  which as my dad reported in The Economist died one year after its birthy in terms of being a system that evolved economically instead of one that piled on more and  more cost.

 

the energy revolution of grameen also started in 1996 - so it is the most interesting grameen business straddling the old pre 1996 village of compelte isolation and the the post 1996 acceleration of grassroots networking (which expoenetaulised at a lagged rate but as grameen energy also proves with impact that can get onto a moo0res law of delievery)

 

www.egrameen.com  linked in grameen memeerhsip round over 100000 hubs of 60 people- the green energy book (Green Energy for a bIllion Poor is written by Nancy Wimmer. Fortuitously, for the first time n any German dissemnination of what goes on in Bangaldesh, it  is written more as a practice diary of the entrepreneurs who grew solar installations moore's curve from a few dozen in the first year of pre-mobile connectivity to over half a milliion new solar units installed during the highly mobile vilages of 2011

 

As keynes said in his last 3 pages of his general theory - youth need to chalenge economist very carefully because the hi-trust one are pasioantely desiugning the futures that most people urgently need weheras the pther pnes are hored by big lobbies or the 0.1% richest or  nost political people to in effect destory the furures most people need most

 

40 years ago dad at the Economist I first saw 500 youth sharing knowledge around an early digital network - we forecast 2010s will be the most exiting decade - it is the one in which youth need to mediate which type of economists system designs will rule the connecd world for ever more.