“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, All the King’s horses and all the King’s men, Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” This children’s rhyme should be going through the minds of the 2,000 aid bureaucrats who are going to descend on the South Korean city of Busan next week for […]
Our recent blog post criticising Muhammad Yunus for his blanket criticism of for-profit investment in microlending has sparked a lively debate, especially in the Twittersphere. The influential @socialedge called the post “must read”. @andrewsprung called it a “pitch-perfect rebuttal to Yunus”. On the other hand, @KimberleyCanada protested “Oh pls. some respect. the man is brilliant […]
It may not have been as terrifying as Francisco Goya’s depiction of Cronus devouring his children , but the article by microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus in today’s New York Times had disturbing echoes of the story from Greek mythology of the titan who, fearing that his offspring will overthrow him, eats them instead. “In the 1970s, when I began working here […]
The mere thought that the Grameen Bank might be taken over by the government of Bangladesh and that Muhammad Yunus, its Nobel Peace Prize-winning founder, might be forcibly retired, is shocking. But senior people inside the world’s best-known microfinance institution fear that this may happen, perhaps quite soon. Already, senior Grameen staff have had to […]
Last year we made a set of predictions for 2010. Some were satisfyingly prescient – the surge in mega-giving we predicted for 2010 became a reality through the Buffett-Gates Giving Pledge (even if we were off the mark in betting on Steve Jobs rather than Larry Ellison to be the Gates business rival who would step up to major philanthropy). […]
“Watch out Vittana”, tweeted Stephanie Strom (@ssstrom), the philanthropy writer at the New York Times, in response to Matthew’s tweet that Kiva, the online microfinance powerhouse, may be about to enter the student lending marketplace. Matthew reported Kiva’s likely expansion in an article in The Economist that argues that lending to finance students in poor […]
“This is pushing microfinance in the loansharking direction,” said Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel peace prize-winning founder of Grameen Bank, in response to today’s news that SKS, an Indian microfinance institution, has gone public. ”It’s not mission drift. It’s endangering the whole mission.” We respectfully disagree. The keenly anticipated initial public offering, which aimed to raise […]
One of the books that influenced our thinking about Philanthrocapitalism was “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits“, by the management guru C. K. Prahalad, who sadly has just passed away. If you have not read the book yet, you should. Frustrated by the failure of traditional aid to end […]
“We may now be able to reconsider the basics of philanthropy,” argues William A. Schambra of the Hudson Institute, musing on the impact of the financial crisis in the Chronicle of Philanthropy “to remind ourselves that, after all is said and done, what foundations do best and most reliably is simply to make grants to worthwhile […]
The former president of the Philippines Corazon Aquino has joined the philanthrocapitalism revolution, according to BusinessMirror. Her anti-poverty PinoyME Foundation is reportedly launching a bond through its Philanthrocapitalism social investment fund to extend its microfinance work to 5 million people across the country, with support from the private sector coming from Metrobank. In the book we […]