Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus, Alan Jolis Read Free Book Online Page A

harvesting their rice. The sight warmed my heart.
     
     
    But I still had misgivings. The success of our three-share experiment had highlighted a problem I had not focused on before. Once the rice was harvested, labor was needed to separate the rice from the dry straw. This mindless, boring work was offered to the cheapest day laborers: destitute women who would otherwise be reduced to begging. For hours on end these poor women would separate the rice with their feet, holding themselves upright by gripping the tiny ledges on the wall in front of them. All day, some twenty-five to thirty women would perform this continuous twisting motion, wrapping the rice straws around their feet to separate the paddy. In the early morning they would race to work, competing for the most comfortable position against the wall. What a terrible life—to earn forty cents investing the weight of your body and the tiresome motion of your bare feet for ten hours a day! These women, many of them widowed, divorced, or abandoned with children to feed, were too poor even to be sharecroppers. They were landless and assetless and without any hope. They were the poorest of the poor. It was clear to me that the wealthier the farmer, the more he earned from my Three Share Farm experiment, and the poorer the worker, the smaller was her share. "Why should we be happy with your Three Share Farm?" one woman said to me. "After a few weeks of threshing, we are out of work, and we have nothing to show for ourselves." She was right. For the same work, a woman could earn at least four times more if she had the financial resources to buy the rice paddy and process it herself.
    The more I studied Jobra's poverty, the more I realized how important it was to differentiate between the really poor and the marginal farmers. International development programs in rural areas always focus on farmers and landowners. In Bangladesh, half of the total population is worse off than the marginal farmer. At the time I was studying Jobra, government bureaucrats and social scientists had not clarified who the "poor" in fact were. Back then, "poor person" could mean many things. For some, the term referred to a jobless person, an illiterate person, a landless person, or a homeless person. For others, a poor person was one who could not produce enough food to feed his or her family year-round. Still others thought a poor person was one who owned a thatched house with a rotten roof, who suffered from malnutrition, or who did not send his or her children to school. Such conceptual vagueness greatly damaged our efforts to alleviate poverty. For one thing, most definitions of the poor left out women and children. In my work, I found it useful to use three broad definitions of poor to describe the situation in Bangladesh * :
    P1—the bottom 20 percent of the population ("hard-core poor"/absolute poor)
    P2—bottom 35 percent of the population
    P3—bottom 50 percent of the population
    Within each category of poor, I often created subclassifications on the basis of region, occupation, religion, ethnic background, sex, age, and so on. Occupational or regional categories may not be as quantifiable as income-asset criteria, but they help us to create a multidimensional poverty matrix.
    Like navigation markings in unknown waters, definitions of poverty need to be distinctive and unambiguous. A definition that is not precise is as bad as no definition at all. In my definition of the poor, I would include the women who threshed rice on our Three Share Farm; women who made bamboo stools: and petty traders who had to borrow at 10 percent per month or sometimes per week. I would also include others like them who earned so little weaving their baskets and sleeping mats that they often resorted to begging. These people had absolutely no chance of improving their economic base. Each one was stuck in poverty.
     
     
    My experience with Jobra's deep tubewell convinced me to turn my focus on the landless