The man who turned generations of beggars into entrepreneurs

Society has never been kind to them. So some of their capacity is buried inside them and I wanted to try out in my own way. So we started programme in Grameen Bank exclusively focused on beggars – the generations of beggars. Their parents were beggars, their grandparents were also beggars – so it runs in the family. So we wanted to address the family of beggars.

We tracked them and explained to them that since you go house-to-house for begging, you can carry merchandise with you. Some cookies, some fruits and other foodstuff. We told them look you’re going house-to-houses anyway so you can carry these items and should not be a problem for you.

They liked the idea and we told them that we will give you the money to buy the merchandise to sell. We gave them about $10-15 – that was the size of the loan. We made it very simple for them. So they started doing. We told them you have two options. One is begging and at the same time you can sell merchandise. There is no restriction whichever comes handy to them. They thought it is easy… not a big deal.

We were expecting one or two thousands beggars to come to us. We were surprised [that] within two years, we have more than 100,000 beggars in the programme. Both our staffers and beggars enjoyed. Some beggars explained to me which houses [were] better for begging and which houses [were] good for selling. So I told my staff that they didn’t go to Harvard School but they know the market segmentation very well.

So this is the kind of innate capacity of human beings.

They pay back the loan and then take bigger loan because they want to expand their business. In three years, we stopped 5 per cent of beggars from begging completely. Because they were successful in selling door-to-door.

Even beggars can show what kind of ability human beings have. Simply you just don’t recognise and keep complaining that the financial system is not addressing their issues. The current system is set to address those who are at the top (rich and wealthy).

In the process we create a big problem – huge income disparity for the wealth is concentrated at the top.

Statistics tells us that 85 people in the world own half the wealth of the world. We look at 99 per cent of the world of the population that don’t own one per cent of the world’s wealth. That is the kind of thing Islamic economy should be addressing.

How to address that? It has to be something like an Islamic economy. When we created Grameen Micro Credit Bank, everybody asked how did you design this bank – such an intricate procedure that you have laid out. We did research and made it simple. Every time we needed a principle or procedure we looked at the conventional banks and how they go about it. Once we learned that, we reversed it.  We did the opposite and it worked.

So going the same way will not always give you the solution to a problem that it created. Going the opposite way may help.

This is one idea you may get. If you see the problem remain unsolved one way to do is to reverse so you can pick up the things you left behind. In Garmeen Bank, we also addressed problems of the poor people’s health. If you’re poor, you’re also poor in health. It goes simultaneously.

So when we are trying to give money to the poor, women we know how bad their health is. They have bundles of health problems. So we gave them health insurance out of the bank to make sure they receive all health facilities out of the insurance money that we collect. For $4 a year, entire family is covered under the insurance programme. All their clinical problems can be solved out of this money.

It’s a self-sustaining way, so you don’t have to make outside money as donation.

Then old age also became a problem. We came up with their pension plan for the poor.

Simple idea, open some savings account, you put fixed amount of money every week and you do it over a period of 10 years; whatever money that you have accumulated over the period in your deposit after 10 years the bank will match with your equal amount. It excited them and they thought it’s a fantastic programme.

And Grameen Bank is a profitable bank.

Compiled by: Waheed Abbas
 

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.