Monday, 8 April 2013
Microloans: the good, the bad and the ugly - a report on TorontotheBetter's screening of Micro-lending: a Critial Investigation
As part of our Rethinking Social Enterprise campaign to make social Toronto's enterprises more arffordable and accessible for the 99% TorontotheBetter recently screened Tom Heinemann's "Micro-Debt: a Critical Investigation", an investigative movie about Nobel Peace prize winner Mohammed Yunnus. Yunnus was the parent of the micro-loan idea, which promotes the use of small, in principle easily repayable, loans to the poor as a way of ending or at least alleviating their poverty. Many NGOs and agencies have since turned to micro-loans as a development strategy. Heinemann found the reality for many microloan receivers in Bangladesh was far different from Yunnus' rosy picture, with penurious interest rates and insistent lenders making their lives a misery, to the point of suicide in some cases.
The TorontotheBetter audience at our screening felt that Heinemann had been fair to Yunnus, notwithstanding the satirically Christ-like pose used for Yunnus in advertising for the movie. But for a variety of reasons the micro-loan hype exceeds, or contradicts, the benefits for many. Like many social enterprises, the micro-loan phenomenon began with generous motives, but for a number of reasons, whether it was Yunnus personal failings (fame and fortune got the better of him), or a wilful neglect of reality - a capitalist context characterized by predatory financial institutions, or simply the difficulty of operating a business when you're undeucated and dirt-poor, - our audience was split about these - micro-lending needs serious modification and regulation before it could be generally adopted as a serious poverty alleviation approach. A more fundamental question perhaps is whether business can ever be a way out of traps the marketplace created in the first place.
To borrow a copy of the video contact TorontotheBetter at postmaster @TorontotheBetter.net.It is a sad and cautionary tale. Several years after the movie was released Heinemann tells TorontotheBetter the Yunnus group refuses to speak to him.
The TorontotheBetter audience at our screening felt that Heinemann had been fair to Yunnus, notwithstanding the satirically Christ-like pose used for Yunnus in advertising for the movie. But for a variety of reasons the micro-loan hype exceeds, or contradicts, the benefits for many. Like many social enterprises, the micro-loan phenomenon began with generous motives, but for a number of reasons, whether it was Yunnus personal failings (fame and fortune got the better of him), or a wilful neglect of reality - a capitalist context characterized by predatory financial institutions, or simply the difficulty of operating a business when you're undeucated and dirt-poor, - our audience was split about these - micro-lending needs serious modification and regulation before it could be generally adopted as a serious poverty alleviation approach. A more fundamental question perhaps is whether business can ever be a way out of traps the marketplace created in the first place.
To borrow a copy of the video contact TorontotheBetter at postmaster @TorontotheBetter.net.It is a sad and cautionary tale. Several years after the movie was released Heinemann tells TorontotheBetter the Yunnus group refuses to speak to him.
# posted by Taodhg @ 6:06 pm 
