Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [4]
Over the last twenty-five years, Grameen’s success has inspired people all over the world. In the mid-1980s, Hillary and I raised funds to open a microcredit facility to spur development in rural Arkansas, based on the Grameen model and following the lead of ShoreBank in Chicago, which had pioneered the concept in America by making loans to local craftsmen to rehabilitate run-down buildings in a distressed area of Chicago’s South Side. During my White House years, I secured funds from Congress to support microcredit programs and establish community development banks in the United States, and to provide about two million microcredit loans a year in developing countries.
Today, millions of loans are being made every year by microcredit institutions funded by governments, banks, businesses, wealthy individuals, and NGOs. In mid-2007, the Department for International Development in the United Kingdom announced a plan to get banking and microcredit for half the world’s poorest people. Meanwhile, Opportunity International Australia, with support from the Gates Foundation, is giving all the clients of its microcredit bank in Malawi Malswitch cards that have fingerprint identification embedded on a chip to guarantee safe and secure access to credit for clients who aren’t literate. The cards will help Malawi reach the critical mass necessary not just to improve individual lives but to lift regional and national economies.
In 2004, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to another citizen activist, Wangari Maathai of Kenya, the first East African woman to earn a doctoral degree. She tells her story in her beautifully written memoir, Unbowed. Thirty years ago, she began a tree-planting effort to promote soil and water conservation, sustainable development, the empowerment of women, good governance, and peace. It grew into the Green Belt Movement, which has helped Kenyan women plant more than 30 million trees; then into the Pan African Green Network, which spread her model of conservation and community building across the continent; and finally into the Green Belt Movement International, which seeks to plant one billion trees over the next decade. In the last few years, Maathai has also launched initiatives to promote waste reduction and increased recycling; to protect the endangered Congo Basin forest ecosystem; and to use conservation to help achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.
The accomplishments of Muhammad Yunus and Wangari Maathai are both unique and representative of a global floodtide of NGO activity. In the United States, such citizen activism is older than our republic. Benjamin Franklin organized the first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia in 1736, forty years before our Declaration of Independence. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, noted the eagerness of Americans to band together in community groups to attack common problems, comparing it favorably to the inclination of Europeans to depend on the state to solve them. The Red Cross, the United Way, and our civic clubs have been around a long time.
What makes the current movement remarkable is the sheer number and global sweep of such efforts, from the multibillion-dollar Gates Foundation to groups like the Self Employed Women’s Association in India, which makes small loans to poor village women to start or expand businesses.
There are several reasons for this explosion of citizen service. First, since the end of the Cold War, for the first time in history a majority of the world’s people are living under elected governments, which create more opportunities for democratic societies and citizen activism to develop. And because of the global mass media culture and leaders’ unavoidable sensitivity to public opinion, even nondemocratic governments find it increasingly difficult to prevent people from organizing for advocacy or action. When I became president in 1993 there were virtually no NGOs in Russia or China. Today, even though President Vladimir Putin has severely restricted them, Russia has