HARDENED and cynical as I have become over the years, I can safely say that it now takes somebody very special to impress me. Many people have made tall claims and generally blown their own trumpet, but I tend to take all this bombast with a large pinch of salt. Indeed, I tend to avoid public speeches altogether because they are usually so dreary and repetitive.

But when I learned that Dr Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, was speaking at a function organized by the Oxford University Press, I noted the time and date carefully in my diary and made it a point to go. Over the years, I had read various accounts of this amazing institution created by Dr Yunus out of nothing, and was now a model for all those countries struggling with the problems of poverty and gender inequality.

While I had a general idea of Grameen Bank’s focus and size, I was unprepared for the sheer scale and breadth of its activities. When Dr Yunus walked to the stage, I must confess that I was expecting a larger-than-life personality. Far from it: he was a casually-dressed, self-effacing figure who spoke simply, yet eloquently to the audience which listened in pin-drop silence, occasionally breaking into spontaneous applause.

Yunus returned to a devastated Bangladesh after completing his studies in economics in the United States in the early seventies. Teaching at the university in Chittagong, the young academic soon saw the contradiction between teaching what he terms as elegant economic theories’ on a pleasant campus, and the grinding poverty prevalent in the nearby village.

When he talked to the villagers, he discovered that many of them were locked into small loans taken from loan sharks who were now collecting huge interest payments. To get them out of this classic debt trap, Yunus spoke to the manager of the bank located at the campus, suggesting that he should lend the villagers the small sums they needed to pay back the loan sharks. The banker laughed in the young professor’s face, saying the villagers had no collateral and were therefore ineligible for bank loans. When Yunus announced he would make them personal loans, the banker warned him that he would never see his money again.

But the idealistic teacher went ahead and lent them 856 takas (or around $30 at the time) of his own money. To his surprise, he was repaid every taka within the stipulated period by the grateful villagers. Yunus drew two conclusions from his experience: firstly, those too poor to qualify for bank loans were the most likely to clear their debts; and secondly, the rich who were getting all the loans were the least likely to repay the loans they took.

Armed with these insights, he returned to the bank manager and asked him to extend credit to villagers as he had proved them to be credit-worthy. The manager replied that this one experience was a fluke, and he should try this experiment in the next village. Yunus did, and was just as successful.

Going up the bank’s hierarchy, he discovered the institutional resistance against lending to the poor. But working with the needy, he also found what small amounts could transform lives. Gradually, his thinking coalesced into the idea of setting up Grameen Bank which came into being in 1983.

From its inception, the bank targeted women, advancing small loans to them to help them become self-sufficient. Yunus proved that not only were they hard working, but by empowering them, the whole family experienced a rise in its quality of life. By now, nearly four million women have taken loans from the bank, and are also shareholders.

Another way in which Grameen shareholders are being empowered is through the shelter loans’ which are given at low interest rates. To be eligible for these, the applicant must own a piece of land. However, since most property in Bangladesh (as in most Muslim countries) is in the names of males, their wives have to persuade them to transfer it to them in order to get the Grameen loans. Six lakh housing units have been built under this scheme, and are all owned by women. As Yunus put it: Let’s see their husbands pronounce talaq’ (divorce) now!”

While Grameen is not a political organization in the usual sense, it is a powerful agent of change. When he discovered that relatively few of the bank’s millions of clients voted, he tried to find out why. Usually, the women replied that since most of the candidates were devils’, they saw no point in voting. Yunus explained to them that they should try and see who was the smallest devil’, and vote for him.

Now, virtually all four million women of the Grameen family vote, and influence others to do so as well. In addition, thousands of them are now standing for, and winning, council seats. The social and political impact of this can well be imagined.

In another revolutionary step, Grameen has bought a 35 per cent stake in the local operations of a foreign cell phone company. Against all advice, he encouraged village women to acquire these mobile devices and use them as public pay phones. People were convinced that simple village women would not know how to use these sophisticated phones. However, they have proved all the so-called experts wrong by charging for their use in remote areas where they are the only means of communications, and making a tidy profit.

Now, Grameen operates over thirty companies dealing in everything from textiles to handicrafts. Stakeholders own shares through an investment company, and also buy the products of their companies. With a user base of four million, you can’t go very wrong.

But more than the impressive financial clout Grameen has acquired over the years, its progress should be measured in terms of lives transformed and futures brightened. Suddenly, four million women are equal partners instead of being regarded as dependents.

Unfortunately, Pakistan’s record in the field of micro-credit is mixed. Although the Orangi Pilot Project has achieved very high recovery rates, and many small businesses in the area have begun with these small loans, it has not been possible to focus on women and use micro-credit as a tool for empowerment.

One reason is that ours is too patriarchal a society to allow women the same freedom enjoyed by their sisters in Bangladesh. Indeed, the most obvious difference between Pakistan and its South Asian neighbours is that here women are noticeable by their absence from our streets. Go to Colombo, New Delhi or Kathmandu and you will see women everywhere, going about their business.

I suppose when you lock up half your population, there is a price to pay.