Page 252 - The Power to Change Anything

Change the Environment 241

another—he quickly learned that he would have to bring them
together under the same roof, and frequently, or his plan would
never work. Dr. Yunus wasn’t merely changing his customers’
financial circumstances when he started his banking business;
he was turning the entire social community on end, and this had
to be done in small, safe, social groups or not at all.
When we (the authors) were visiting a village called
Gazipur in Bangladesh, here’s what we learned about what Dr.
Yunus had done to enlist the power of propinquity to create a
new social order. In addition to promoting economic well-
being, Grameen Bank asks that each borrower commit to 16
“Decisions.” As we stood in the back of a small building con-
taining a 30-member borrowing unit, we watched attentively as
all 30 borrowers stood in unison and recited the 16 Decisions—
one of which was: “I will neither give nor receive dowry.”
This particular commitment is of grave importance to the
group’s economic well-being. The dowry—in which parents are
required to pay a man to marry their daughter—can cause both
social strife and economic disaster. Families are brought to
penury as they try to scrape together enough money to induce
a man to take their daughter in wedlock. Daughters are rou-
tinely berated by fathers who lament the fact that they fathered
a girl who would later cost them so much money. Now, here
stood 30 women at attention, loudly proclaiming their commit-
ment to abolish the “curse of the dowry.”
Later, as we chatted with the 30 women, we asked, “How
many of you have had a son or daughter marry in the past
year?” Five women proudly raised their hands. And then we
sprung the follow-up question. “How many of you either gave
or received dowry?” Three hands went sheepishly into the air.
But two—Dipali and Shirina—didn’t raise theirs. Here was evi-
dence that this millennium-old practice was giving way. So we
asked the two women to tell us how they had resisted the prac-
tice. They smiled broadly, looked at each other, and then
Dipali said, “I had my son marry her daughter.” With that the
30 women broke into spontaneous applause.