http://www.moneylife.in/
Alex Counts, president, CEO and founder of Grameen Foundation. http://www.grameenfoundation. |
'Grameen America today has 7,000 clients, almost half of whom are served by its original branch in Queens – a modest one-room space in a neighborhood where one can find store signboards with writing in English, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic and Korean. The scale of operations outpaces virtually every other MFI in the United States. It was exciting to sit in their office one recent afternoon and see how smoothly everything was proceeding – half-dozen center managers had each attended between three and five meetings, as they do every weekday, and by 1 p.m. the office was filling up with clients who were coming for their loans, which are renewed every six months if prior loans are paid on time (as almost all are).
It turns out that most centers are populated by people from the same Latin American country – all except one woman in the center I visited was from Mexico (the lone exception was from Ecuador). Others are dominated by Dominicans or Guatemalans, while some are fairly mixed. Most of the businesses are related to food (pushcart, catering, etc.), clothing and other retail (such as flowers). About eight of the women in the center I visited – which had about 30 members attending – were involved in Herbalife, a kind of nutrition program sold through a network of women who are organized like Avon ladies.'
Alex Counts, president, CEO and founder of Grameen Foundation.
It turns out that most centers are populated by people from the same Latin American country – all except one woman in the center I visited was from Mexico (the lone exception was from Ecuador). Others are dominated by Dominicans or Guatemalans, while some are fairly mixed. Most of the businesses are related to food (pushcart, catering, etc.), clothing and other retail (such as flowers). About eight of the women in the center I visited – which had about 30 members attending – were involved in Herbalife, a kind of nutrition program sold through a network of women who are organized like Avon ladies.'
Alex Counts, president, CEO and founder of Grameen Foundation.
Frighteningly, the actual inventor of micro credit, Professor Muhammad Yunus, has appeared as key-note speaker at a Congress of the so-called 'World Federation of Direct Selling Associations.' Apparently, Prof. Yunus was also too naive to know that the majority of so-called 'Direct Selling' companies, like'Herbalife' have been the corporate fronts for an insidious form of cultic racketeering which enslaves the poor by offering them the illusion of future financial freedom.