Page 182 - The Power to Change Anything

Find Strength in Numbers 171

When the word got out that hair earned toys, our unlikely
entrepreneur was inundated. Eventually Tanika sold the hair,
repaid her loan, and had capital left over to expand.
A year has passed, and Tanika now has hundreds of women
working for her. They gather hair in the villages using toys and
sell the hair to Tanika, who then sells it again for a profit. She
no longer worries about her family’s next meal. And not only
has she raised her family to a position far above the poverty line,
but Tanika is no longer the same shy, frightened person she was
a year ago.

LESSONS FROM A NOBEL LAUREATE

This example raises an interesting question. Why was Tanika
able to succeed despite the fact that hundreds of millions of
people just like her have failed to fight their way out of poverty?
To answer this question, we need to spend time with a recent
Nobel Prize winner who just happens to be the genius behind
Tanika’s success. Meet the soft-spoken and brilliant Muham-
mad Yunus. He’s the man who figured out how to help Tanika
and another hundred million people out of poverty.
Here’s the part of his amazing story that provides the cen-
tral theme to this chapter. After leaving the United States with
a doctorate in economics, Dr. Yunus decided to return to his
homeland of Bangladesh to become a university professor. As
he assumed his comfortable teaching position, he was horri-
fied to discover that just outside the academic compound hun-
dreds of thousands of people were dying of starvation.
As Dr. Yunus investigated, it didn’t take him long to dis-
cover that the root cause of Bangladesh’s acute and chronic
poverty was not the indolence of the poor. Everywhere he
looked in neighboring villages he saw people who worked
hard but who were still unable to earn a decent wage. After
interviewing 42 people in one village, he was shocked to dis-
cover that the biggest barrier was not energy, but capital. Few