In Bangladesh, 100,000 rural poor are "phone ladies"
Stuart Hart told Earth & Sky about a lending program by Grameen bank in Bangladesh to "start a village phone company." Hart added," They essentially loan them the money to buy a cell phone and a solar recharger. With some training in entrepeneurship and numerical literacy, the women become entrepeneurs. They sell the phone service in their immediate village or surrounding villages. Since they know what the market is, they control the pricing. And this business has just utterly boomed." Image courtesy of Grameen Bank.
JB: This is Earth & Sky. Stuart Hart is a professor of business at Cornell University. His book is called Capitalism at the Crossroads.
DB: He told us about the Grameen Bank – which specializes in what’s called microcredit – and which helped start a village phone company in Bangladesh.
Stuart Hart: And most people initially thought that they were crazy, that only rich, city people in developed countries could afford a cell phone But that was never their model. In essence what they’ve done is empowered close to 100,000 rural women to become phone ladies. They essentially loan them the money to buy a cell phone and a solar recharger, and with some training in entrepreneurship and numeracy and that sort of thing, the women become entrepreneurs and sell the phone service in their immediate village or surrounding villages.
JB: Hart said the cell phone business in rural Bangladesh is booming.
Stuart Hart: There was so much pent up demand, because if you think about it, it’s a question of information poverty, that poor people in remote or isolated areas, it’s very difficult for them to get access to good information. So a farmer, for example, might spend four or five days traveling into the city to try and find out what he’d be able to sell his crops for, riding on mules and buses, and then still not get the right information. Now, the farmer can make two or three calls, and in the space of a half an hour, has much better information, can make a more informed choice . . .
DB: Hart said those rural phone services are now morphing into Internet connections as well. More, at earthsky.org. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth & Sky.
Read our interview with Stuart Hart.
Stuart Hart told Earth & Sky: “It turns out that having access through phone or internet connection out in rural areas provides huge amounts of consumer surplus, and can substantially increase users income by virtue of the fact that they can get access to much better information, not to mention the phone ladies themselves, who were able to double or triple their family income by selling the phone services in the village itself.”
The founder of the Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize.
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