COMMENT BY TFD: Empowerment for Development

To empower people they have to know how. Power is nothing you can give to people - you can only show them how to use it - if they accept it. The idea and the understanding of how people can change their situation can only evolve from insights of processes they are dependent on. Only the second step towards “development” is the availability of capital and infrastructure. Important is that mostly capital with interest sets higher incentives for ideas that create a surplus. Moreover is capital a limited resource and only if money is payed back - somebody else can borrow this money.

The western mentality of social equality measured in money has a distinct conflict of goals with this rising ideology of micro credits. It assumes a certain status quo of rich and poor people equivalent with happy and unhappy people - a type of “god given” situation which can only be solved by giving money to the poor from the rich. The smile of a starving child in Bangladesh may not be political correct but shows the absurdity of defining happiness by welfare. The low social mobility in countries like Germany and France are the result of a heavy regulated welfare state for the “good of the poor”.

However the West is lucky. The developing countries are coming to help us. The people that learned to believe in the poor. The countries that live entrepreneurship to survive are coming to help to achieve what we failed to do - to empower the poor and give them dignity over their own destiny. The Grameen Bank is the first micro credit institute giving micro loans for micro entrepreneurs in the slums of LA, in the United States. Germany’s welfare system - supplying the poor with the “drug”: money and Germany’s judicial circumstances - however - is still considered to be too competitive for this type of micro credits.

Additional information: What the West can learn from Bangladesh

The West can learn from this little interview Dr. Yunus is giving at theVision Summit 2007 in Berlin.

. He is basically saying that everybody can and should be an enterpreneur and that education must promote this idea. I am happy that Dr. Yunus as a role model from Bangladesh turns out to be a voice for Germans as well since enterpreneuship irocanally has a very negative image in Germany.