Women at the Centre

"Women at the Centre is about Grameen Bank. Grameen is probably the world’s best-known microfinance bank, and its founder, Muhammad Yunus , is almost certainly the world’s best-known microfinance banker, especially after he and his bank jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Helen Todd is a journalist who decided to spend the best part of a year in the mid 1990s in a village in Bangladesh. By that time Grameen was already becoming famous around the world, and a dangerous bubble of unthinking adulation about it had begun to build up. Todd didn’t set out to prick this bubble, but she wanted to find out what was really going on in the villages where, we had all been told, women were rapidly moving out of poverty within a few years of the arrival of a branch of the Grameen Bank in their neighbourhood. Women at the Centre tells the stories of the women who were her neighbours for a year, many of whom opened accounts at the bank, and some of whom didn’t. The book blew away the more unhealthy mythology that was growing up around Grameen and put in its place a much more grounded realistic and believable account of what really happens to poor women who take a small loan and try to do their best with it. No, not really. By the time Todd was doing her work I had already been living in Bangladesh for a decade. But Todd’s book certainly did encourage me to start work on what I still regard as my best book, The Poor and Their Money , which was published in 2000. The Poor and Their Money is a review of the mechanisms that poor people use to manage their money which I had sought out and examined with my own eyes in dozens of countries on three continents. In 1996 I began trying to practise what I was preaching by starting a microfinance organisation, Safe Save, in the Dhaka slums. Unlike Grameen, whose ambition is to help poor women escape poverty by starting and running small businesses, Safe Save’s ambitions are at once more modest but broader – Safe Save simply wants to be the partner of choice for poor men, women and children who want to manage their money better."