Overview

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Welcome to those who are receiving this blog for the first time. Everyone is welcome to respond with thoughts or questions of general interest that you are comfortable sharing with others reading the blog.

I am one third through a three week trip visiting the world's two largest microcredit organizations, Grameen Bank and BRAC. Most of the time is being spent in villages seeing microcredit first hand - attending Center Meetings (a center consists of 8 - 12 groups of 5 - 7 individuals in each group for a total of 50+ or so in each Center - which meets in the village with the Center Manager once a week) and interviewing borrowers (regular borrowers - those living on $2 or less a day, beggar borrowers whose only income has been from begging and higher education loans for children of Grameen borrowers) and staff (Manager of Centers - Groups of 50 - 70 borrowers) = Branch Managers (Manage 3,600 or so borrowers) and the next two levels of management (Area and Zone Managers) as well as the head of Auditing,. This, combined with my previous trip to Grameen de la Frontera provides me a jump start in being able to help implement a microcredit program (replication) in another country. My friend Daudi (a native Ugandan who lives in Los Osos/San Luis Obispo) and I are exploring providing microcredit to his native village and surrounding area in Uganda. We are exploring three alternatives: (1) influencing a microcredit program nearby to expand into the area that Daudi was born; (2) creating a microfinace program from scratch and (3) getting Grameen Trust (in Bangadesh) to implent and Build - Operate - Turn over program - which would combine with 2.

The Grameen Dialogue Program that I am currently attending has 20 students from all over the world. To go to the villages we split up in six separate groups of 3 - led by a senior Grameen management person who serves as facilitator/guide. My village group consisted of a man living in Hong Kong and looking to do a replication in mainland China, an Austrian woman who is looking to do a repleication in Egypt (she is also here on a three month internship) and myself.

Mid next week I will complete the Grameen Dialogue and move to BRAC Inn in Dhaka where I will start my 8 day program with BRAC. This will be a custom program exclusively for me. I will be traveling five hours north on Dhaka on a bus (by myself) where I will then spend time in villages around Rangpur.

This is a very intense and profound experience, My next blog will tell you about food, hotels, tranportation, weather, etc and how I am doing with each.

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Comments

[Lynn Cederquist]

pictures
Marty, what do the villages look like? and would love to see the women weaving baskets. How is the weather? How do you do your wash? Are you loosing weight? Enjoy seeing the pictures of the area. Do they consider you a giant? You seem to tower over the people. How do the children respond to you? Lynn

[MartyJ]

Your Comments
Hi Lynn - I think that many of your questions were answered in a blog I subsequemtly wrote and others I will include in future blogs. Now it is mid-night and I will try to get back to sleep. Tomorrow the hotel will have my laundry done and back same day.