Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
by Muhammad Yunus

Chapter Four:
The Stool Makers of Jobra Village

In 1976, I began visiting the poorest households in Jobra to see if I could help them directly in any way. There were three parts to the village: a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Buddhist section. When I visited the Buddhist section, I would often take one of my students, Dipal Chandra Barua, a native of the Buddhist section, along with me. Otherwise, a colleague, Professor H. I. Latifee, would usually accompany me. He knew most of the families and had a natural talent for making villagers feel at ease.

One day as Latifee and I were making our rounds in Jobra, we stopped at a run-down house with crumbling mud walls and a low thatched roof pocked with holes. We made our way through a crowd of scavenging chickens and beds of vegetables to the front of the house. A woman squatted on the dirt floor of the verandah, a half-finished bamboo stool gripped between her knees. Her fingers moved quickly, plaiting the stubborn strands of cane. She was totally absorbed in her work.

On hearing Latifee’s call of greeting, she dropped her bamboo, sprang to her feet, and scurried into the house.

“Don’t be frightened,” Latifee called out. “We are not strangers. We teach up at the university. We are neighbors. We want to ask you a few questions, that is all.”

Reassured by Latifee’s gentle manner, she answered in a low voice, “There is nobody home.” She meant there was no male at home. In Bangladesh, women are not supposed to talk to men who are not close relatives.

Children were running around naked in the yard. Neighbors peered out at us from their windows, wondering what we were doing.

In the Muslim sections of Jobra, we often had to talk to women through bamboo walls or curtains. The custom of purdah (literally, “curtain” or “veil” kept married Muslim women in a state of virtual seclusion from the outside world. It was strictly observed in Chittagong District.

As I am a native Chittagonian and speak the local dialect, I would try to gain the confidence of Muslim women by chatting. Complimenting a mother on her baby was a natural way to put her at ease. I now picked up one of the naked children beside me, but he started to cry and rushed over to his mother. She let him climb into her arms.

“How many children do you have?” Latifee asked her.

“Three.”

“He is very beautiful, this one,” I said.

Slightly reassured, the mother came to the doorway, holding her baby. She was in her early twenties, thin, with dark skin and black eyes. She wore a red sari and had the tired eyes of a woman who labored every day from morning to night.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Sufiya Begum.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

I did not use a pen and notepad, for that would have scared her off. Later, I only allowed my students to take notes on return visits.

“Do you own this bamboo?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How do you get it?”

“I buy it.”

“How much does the bamboo cost you?”

“Five taka.” At the time, this was about twenty-two cents.

“Do you have five taka?”

“No, I borrow it from the paikars.”

“The middlemen? What is your arrangement with them?”

“I must sell my bamboo stools back to them at the end of the day as repayment for my loan.”

“How much do you sell a stool for?”

“Five taka and fifty poysha.”

“So you make fifty poysha profit?”

She nodded. That came to a profit of just two cents.

“And could you borrow the cash from the moneylender and buy your own raw material?”

“Yes, but the moneylender would demand a lot. People who deal with them only get poorer.”

“How much does the moneylender charge?”

“It depends. Sometimes he charges 10 percent per week. But I have one neighbor who is paying 10 percent per day.”

“And that is all you earn from making these beautiful bamboo stools, fifty poysha?”

“Yes.”

Sufiya did not want to waste any more time talking. I watched as she set to work again, her small brown hands plaiting the strands of bamboo as they had every day for months and years on end. This was her livelihood. She squatted barefoot on the hard mud. Her fingers were callused, her nails black with grime.

How would her children break the cycle of poverty she had started? How could they go to school when the income Sufiya earned was barely enough to feed her, let alone shelter her family and clothe them properly? It seemed hopeless to imagine that her babies would one day escape this misery.

Sufiya Begum earned two cents a day. It was this knowledge that shocked me. In my university courses, I theorized about sums in the millions of dollars, but here before my eyes the problems of life and death were posed in terms of pennies. Something was wrong. Why did my university courses not reflect the reality of Sufiya’s life? I was angry, angry at myself, angry at my economics department and the thousands of intelligent professors who had not tried to address this problem and solve it. It seemed to me the existing economic system made it absolutely certain that Sufiya’s income would be kept perpetually at such a low level that she would never save a penny and would never invest in expanding her economic base. Her children were condemned to live a life of penury, of hand-to-mouth survival, just as she had lived it before them, and as her parents did before her. I had never heard of anyone suffering for the lack of twenty-two cents. It seemed impossible to me, preposterous. Should I reach into my pocket and hand Sufiya the pittance she needed for capital? That would be so simple, so easy. I resisted the urge to give Sufiya the money she needed. She was not asking for charity. And giving one person twenty-two cents was not addressing the problem on any permanent basis.

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