all I can say that whatever I did uh probably if I can look back I can say I was uh trying to do very little things and I was not trying to persuade anybody to do anything just what I thought I can do I tried to do do that uh and it started with a little amount of money so little that um you can laugh at it uh looking back it's a total loan of $27 to 42 people so it's not even a dollar a piece so that's what excited me and wanted to do more
of it uh trying to persuade the banks to do it they wouldn't do it so I offered myself as a guarantor I said okay I'll sign all your papers and take all the risk and you give the money they were stuck with their rules and procedures so I was trying to kind of get over those things and that was the beginning luckily it worked and continued to grow lending money to poor women tiny little money everybody said it's going to collapse very soon he said until it collapses I'll keep on doing it so why should
I stop it just because someday it is going going to collapse which we don't know whether it will uh that's it and then we created a bank out of it called it gramine bank or Village Bank and people ask me how did you figure this out all these rules and procedures that you put into it so that it can work even in very adverse circumstances still it works I said oh I don't do very hard work I easygoing man uh I just look at the conventional Banks how they do it and once I learn how
they do it each piece and I just do Theos it and it works they go to the rich people so I decided to go to the poor people they go to men so I decided to go to woman they go to the city center do business I wanted to go to the Village remote Village they want collateral I said forget about collateral who wants Catal if you want col you never get to the poor people so dismissed collateral they have big lawyers in their Bank we said we don't need lawyers so we are the only
lawyer free Bank in the whole world probably it works we don't need them and lawyers and the banks conventional Banks want to know your all antients what you have been doing whether you know everything what kind of business you have been running everything your past as much details as they can get so we said forget about it we are not interested in the past of our borrowers we are interested in the future of our borrowers so if you're looking for the poor people I'm sure there's something they have done which know may not be very
pleasant why you dig into it so because he or she is not responsible for society is responsible for what he or she has been doing so why don't you just give it a break and start fresh uh see what he or she wants and this is how we wanted to do conventional Banks uh concentrated uh on owning or conventional banks are owned by the B uh Bri people so we reverse that too we made this bank owned by the poor people and not only conventional banks are owned by rich people mostly it's owned by rich
men so we reverse that we not only make it owned by the poor people we made it owned by poor women so this is a bank which is owned by the borrowers themselves right now we have 8.3 million borrowers 97% of them are women and they own the bank and they run the bank they are the board they decide the rules and procedures and so on so forth so this is one way to describe how the operationally and structurally the whole bank is done and then you can understand where we come from it's not just
tiny size of loan makes it ging bank is a kind of making everything other way in one meeting in the early years 10th year or 11th year of Bankers the one Banker was saying Professor you you're not going to get get away with this you made the whole banking system upside down I said yes I that's what exactly I did because banking system was a standing on its head so I'm trying to put it on his feet and they challenged me on account they said you should change the name of your bank make the name
gamine women's Bank several Bankers suggested that I should change the name of the bank because explanation was at that time we are only 64% women the rest of is men at early years so when I was replying to this question I said yes I'm very happy to change the name of the bank I'll make the bank gramine women's bank but but before I do that you would like you would have to do something change the name of your bank because 99% of your borrowers are men so you should say X men's Bank y men's Bank
Z men's Bank after you have done this then I will come and do mine I mean women's man so it's very easy when you do it with women everybody says it's wrong you shouldn't if you do it with men that's perfect there's no problem with that so this is continuously we have been facing and another issue comes up in our work because I've been insisting that all human beings are entrepreneurs it Burns of many people oh why does he say that there are only few people who are entrepreneurs rest of us we are not entrepreneurs
we have to work under the entrepreneurs I said no all human beings are entrepreneurs that's how we survived on this planet otherwise we would be in the caves still living the kind of life we lived there because we all work together to change our life that's how we came here and still function here they didn't take it very seriously then they said yes you can lend money to the poor people but you should be looking for entrepreneurial poor I said not in my case because everybody's entrepreneur so I go ahead with that even she tells
me again and again no sorry please don't give me money I don't know what to do with my your money I never used money in my life I can't use your money we don't give up we keep chasing we came and explaining to her no you can do that so that confidence builds up in her just because she doesn't have confidence doesn't mean that she have she doesn't have entrepreneurial ability it's a question of building confidence in her so we Tred to build the confidence because Society has totally demolished her confidence in herself that's what
the poor people are you're saying you are wrong you're no good you're good for nothing and generation after generation that they have heard it they that's what they believe in so we wanted to change that build confidence in them so in order to demonstrate that even the poorest person can be entrepreneur one idea came to me why don't I do something so that I can demonstrate this this idea was to lend money to Beggars you cannot be poorer than Beggars that's the last stage of human survival you have no other source you go and beg
for your daily food go to houses neighbors find something to eat or get some money to eat and that's how you surv you not only do it once or twice that becomes your livelihood for rest of your life I said let's try that so we started talking to the Beggars we started talking that as you go from house to house begging would you like to carry some merchandise with you some cookies some candies some toys for the kids and we make it sound easy for them by saying you are going there anyway this is not
extra work for you so and you are giving people more options so that if they don't give want to give anything free you may try to sell something so they may like to buy something or they may like to do both give you some food free and also buy something from you so you have two businesses going instead of one business people like that Beggars like that they said where do we get the money I said we'll give you the money so we started giving them the loan our idea was if they succeeded in getting
the loan and paying us back by the business they would do that will show that yes even a beggar can be an entrepreneur on his own on her own we thought there'll be 1,000 or 2,000 beggars in that program it became such a popular program we ended up with more than th 100,000 beggars in that program and we have been watching them what is there what are they doing it's became very popular what they do as we explain and now in The Last 5 Years this is about the time that we are doing it in
Last 5 Years out of this 100,000 Beggars more than 22,000 Beggars have stopped begging completely because they became successful door to-door salesperson and not only they became door-to-door salesperson some of them became your personal shoppers you come and the housewife say says when you come tomorrow you bring me this she brings you this because she cannot go to the market all the time but this lady is going around doing things so she brings you whatever you need it little things but you have a good business going people ask us to buy them and she she
feels comfortable and the family feels comfortable with it my colleagues who are getting so enthusiastic about this program because they see that even a beggar can change her life by selling something doing something they keep saying why don't the other begar get out of begging why are they taking so much time I try to I try to advise them to be patient I said please be patient it takes time after all begging is their Core Business you don't shut down your core business just like that you have to totally confident how the new business your
sales division is working so so once they figure out what a sales division is doing well then they may say well this division core Core Business we can now shift so it takes a lot of courage to come to that stage that you close down completely so this is gradually they will come when you talk to them they tell you something very interesting they said they know which house is good for buying selling which house is good for begging so they go accordingly so by by this time they have experience uh between and who are
the one who doing both so I tell my colleagues not only they do the business we have not trained them anything they they already know how to uh do the market segmentation which one and their loan size is such a small amount they start with something like $12 $15 that's about the size and paying back that loan they en itic to take the second loan and the third loan each one becomes bigger and bigger and bigger so you look at this phenomenon and you ask yourself what creates poverty what created this situation that human being
has to be brought into this kind of situation where they have to beg for existence is this the fault of the person repeatedly I come to the same conclusion there is nothing nothing wrong with the people poverty is not created by the poor people poverty is created by the system that we have built the concepts that we have created that's what created poverty nothing absolutely nothing wrong in human beings it is poverty is externally imposed phenomenon it is not internally developed phenomenon so if it is externally de imposed phenomenon we can if we remove that
that external imposition people will come up as human being as anybody else and that's how the question of that Bonsai came it started describing poor people as Bonsai people there's nothing wrong with their seed they their seed as good as anybody else's seed simply Society didn't never gave them the space to grow so they are just like the tree on a flower pot so thinking what's going wrong with the concept I F I started looking at what is happening in the world I said in the meantime in order to solve problems I started creating businesses
it almost became instinctive in me whenever I see a problem I go right ahead and design a business start a business to solve that problem I didn't notice it before but when you have done it once when you've done it twice and you have done it 100 times then you realize it like you have an instinctive feature that you design a business to solve a problem you look back you created so many pro so many such companies we have problem of electricity so we created a solar energy company everybody said oh solar business is not
going to work in Bangladesh I said who knows it may work let me give it a try nothing wrong if I fail it's okay but I have to try so I tried to bring solar home system it is expensive for the plural people we made it easy for them to pay back it was extremely difficult even to sell five solar home system per month it was such a struggle now we came to a stage after 15 years we sell more than thousand solar home system per day and it's growing improving and it's done in a
business way so we did the solar energy in a business way and it's expanding people love it because they need electricity because kerosene L is no good for them so this is what we do then I realized maybe this is a category of business which is missing in the in the whole conceptual framework because conceptual framework gives you one type of business business to make money I said that's a wrong interpretation of human beings human beings are not just money-making machines human beings are not robots human beings are much bigger than just onedimensional being they're
multi-dimensional being what happened to other dimensions so that's when the question of selfish aspect of human being selfless aspect of human being came into discussion I said why don't we create business on the basis of the selflessness where I don't want to make money for myself by decision nobody has imposed it because I'm so excited to create business to solve a problem it is such an ex such an exciting experience to be able to solve a problem then I said that maybe is the one which you should be doing it's a non-loss non-dividend company to
solve a social problem so we started creating more and more of these companies then we had one connection with the Danon of France we talked to Frank ribo he was trying to understand what Gamin back is I started asking him what uh donon is then he said uh he has explained to me what done on is suddenly I didn't think about it before because I I I didn't go with a plan for him just stopped on the way to talk to him I said what why don't she have a company in Bangladesh we can do
it jointly whatever he thought he just stood up shook hands with me he said yes let's do that I said but I have not finished here I said it will be a social business he said what is a social business then I gave my spill this is the social business you'll never get any money out of it you can take your money back to what you invested but nothing more than that he stood up again shook hands he said I'm I agree then I thought he didn't understand my Bangladeshi English and I didn't understand his
French English so on the way out I sent him a very detailed email and he immediately sent back I understood everything you said I stand by what I committed let's go ahead and do it and this is 2005 that company was created in 2007 and continued to function now we produce yogurt fortified with micronutrients for the children who were malnourished in Bangladesh and that yogurt does wonderful thing to the children because half the children of Bangladesh are malnourished so this produced a yogurt which has all these micronutrients and once this children eat this they regain
their health because you see if you are malnourished your physical growth becomes very stunted similarly your mental growth becomes stunted so it's a very strange situation for a nation to have a half the children malnourished so we thought at least in our way we can see if we can do that now it works since it works as a social business so we can go and replicate Ed as many factories as possible we have just the first factory which is fully uh in full production so we are starting the second Factory and we calculate we'll have
50 such factories around the country so that every child has access to this yoga it's a delicious yoga children love it so that's an example of social business so we created many such social business with International collaborations not because we wanted it but International multinational companies wanted it so we have collaboration with bolia to produce water our water has a serious problem arenic and pollution so we are creating we have created a small company to bring clean water in the village in a very affordable way we created a company to produce shoes with Adidas we
challenged them that they should take a position that nobody in the world should go without shoes and as a shoe company it is their responsibility to produce shoes affordable to the poorest people they ask me how much the price should be to make it affordable I said maybe under one Euro they were shocked that Adidas shoes had to be sold under one Euro so I said well it's a if you want to do it that's the price range you can go they took the challenge after long debate and discussion within the company they did that
now after two years of research and test marketing uh next month we'll have the full Mass marketing will begin actually next month so this is another example of social business because bear wearing Adidas shoes or rebok shoes doesn't mean you are going for fashion this is an essential thing if you go barefit particularly in country in tropical countries like Bangladesh you contact lots of diseases particularly parasitic diseases and many many people are affected particularly women and children are affected by this because they are always in an area where it very easy to contact uh parasitic
diseases so you protect them from the parasitic diseases we have created gamine BSF to bring mosqueton Nets so that you are not attacked by the malaria and all these companies are done for the sake of protecting yourself from diseases or escape from uh malnutrition and so on so forth companies don't want to make money out of it they want to make sure the impact of this companies are on the people you measure the impact so in a moneymaking companies at the end of the year you ask your CEO how much money we made this year
the more money you make more excited you get in a social business you ex you ask your CEO how much impact we have made this year you're not asking how much money we made because you're not making money for yourself if money is made it stays with the company but the whole company is dedicated to create the impact and that's how measurement of impact becomes very important thing so that way if you open it up this idea can create a new kind of phenomenon if you I believe that every human being has that selflessness but
our Theory our concept doesn't allow that to come out so I'm creating a window I'm creating a door so that it come out if it comes out then all the problems we have created over years and years of our way of singl minded Pursuit Of Money uh may be addressed by creating all this uh social business to address that technology is our at our command we have enormous technology but this technology is at the control of the businesses what do they use of it make use of it make money I said if we can now
create a door or create a road to use this technology to solve problems all this problem will be resolved human creativity and human capacity is Limitless in the presence of this Limitless human capacity and human creativity all the problems of the world cannot just stand for few seconds it it has to disappear and this is the age where we all have this capacity of Technology all the question is do we have the methodology of using this capacity to address this problems if you do we can do it through social business you may have better idea
of doing it but whole question is creativity of human being has to be channeled to address the problems that we have made for ourselves if we do that we can create a whole new world we can create a whole new civilization and that's what we should be looking for thank you very much
