Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus (Tuesday, January 24, 2012) (3)

The title of this film, Bonsai People, comes from one of Muhammad Yunus' millions of aphorisms about how people are like bonsai trees and that they can grow but they need care and love and the right soil. Yunus is a really great guy. He saw a need for micro-lending in his native Bangladesh and began the Grameen Bank, a nimble bank that broke with international tradition by lending small amounts of money to the poorest people they could find. Grameen's clients are almost all women who are looking for small loans under $100 to buy a cow or a few small trees or some seeds to start a small business. This documentary looks at all that Grameen and Yunus do.

After Yunus got tons of attention in 2006 when he won the Nobel Peace Prize, international companies fell all over themselves to work with him in one of the zillions of Grameen off-shoots, in health, housing, farming, livestock, childhood and women's education, disaster relief, food and on and on. The film is punctuated with some of Yunus' more wholesome and banal chestnuts ("Credit is a human right;" "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime;" "Making an impact in people's lives is as important as making money.") and we see how his policies and ideas are helping to life poor women out of poverty throughout Bangladesh.

Strangely criticisms of Grameen's lending practices are mentioned and quickly dismissed. We never really see what happens to women who can't pay back their debts and why (there's a suggestion that health care emergencies sometimes get in the way of paying back the loans... but that seems like a much too specific reason). There's also a strange sense, in discussion with some of Grameen' more long-term borrowers, that the bank acts as a bit of a pusher forcing women to take loans they might not need or want. One women proudly shows off her beautiful house and farm paid for by work and Grameen loans. Wonderful - but it does feel a bit like she's a junkie showing all the wonderful different drugs her dealer has given to her. A bit strange. I wish there had been a bit more balance to this portrait and that it came off as less of a propaganda tool than it does.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

1 comment:

  1. Hi Aaron,
    Thank you for taking the time to watch and review my film.

    It was helpful to see they way it came through your eyes.

    I have to say that after seeing that, I would have added that Ayesha had fallen out of Grameen’s system when I went back.

    Also in my bonus material one of the women who I had followed did not end up in the film and when I went back, she was no longer in the program. From what I witnessed they were in no way pushing people to stay in the program if they didn’t want to stay. That woman who didn’t stay had gone from having one cow to three and was happy with her current situation. Even though she didn’t stay in, it had helped her out financially.

    Also they didn’t put any pressure on Melancho to take a loan when she didn’t want to. And there are 500 branches now that actually have Grameen member with more savings than in loans.

    As for the whole government incident, I was mostly finished with the film when this came to light and because of the insanity of the whole situation compared to his almost 40 years of work, I looked at this as a blip in time compared to what he has put into existence on the ground.

    While I was filming in Bangladesh both former prime ministers (including the one who is back) were in and out of exile for corruption charges. There were even 23 senators in jail while I was there for corruption. The country is notorious for being among the top of the most corrupt countries in the world.

    I will say that one of the ideas of the government in taking over the bank is to drop the number of female borrowers on the board of directors from 9 out of 12 down to 6, so that they would not be the majority. That does not bode well for the direction they want to take the bank.

    And in September when the female board of directors came to Dhaka 6 of them were harassed. Also Jannat, who is a higher up female in management had her house raided while she was out of town.

    I will also share this link from the Economist:
    http://www.economist.com/node/21543547


    And say that when I went to try to sell the film to 4 TV stations in Bangladesh – the managers all openly talked to me about the government censorship and that they probably would not be able to air it while the current prime minister is in office.

    I could go on with more, but there was no room for all of this in the film. I could easily make another piece about what has happened but after 5 years of following the work and making this film, I feel like that is just about the current government that I fail to comprehend and don’t really want to personally go after.

    The cases when the loans didn’t work, really were few. The majority of those were for health issues, the others were if people borrowed from other organizations and got in over their heads. I didn’t personally see that happening, but it is just like when some people here get in over their heads with credit card or have too high of a mortgage. What I did see though was that people could only take higher loans incrementally to try to prevent that from happening. Grameen did their best to assure that loans were for income generation and not for everyday purchases. That often has happened in the cases I read about in Andhra Pradesh, they would use the loans for purchasing, not income generating activies and those groups had interest rates almost double that of Grameens.

    I went in with an open mind, but what I saw was that this system works for the majority of people.

    Even in the film, I showed Shahnaj struggling at first and then figuring it out. I also shared Ayesha’s trouble with first selling bananas. I don’t believe that I wasn’t balanced, I just think that it is a pretty good system after watching them over the course of 4 years.

    Sincerely,
    Holly

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