Creating a World without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism - Muhammad Yunus

Am fostering a growing interest in the area of social enterprise. Decided to pick this book up and join the Singapore Social Enterprise yahoo group to bring myself up to speed on what are the global and local developments in the area.

Here's my own summary and take on this good man and his ideas.

What Yunus is proposing as the future of capitalism is his idea of a social business - an organisation spawned from a social objective but creates a profit-making shell so that it can be self-sustaining. This is a wholly different concept from that of CSR, where a company with a profit-making core attempts to increase the scope of its bottom line to include social and environmental good. As opposed to charities, this allows greater survivability, self-sufficiency, scalability, and ultimately the capability of the organisation to do greater good. Being an absolute noob to the world of business and charities, I can easily imagine myself scorning such an idea if I had no prior knowledge about how much the Grameen Bank has accomplished.

Central to Yunus's philosophy is that economics currently assumes, for the sake of over-simplification, that we are all one-dimensional human beings with only one objective - profit-maximisation. Yunus wonders if we could have a more enc0mpassing view of human desires in economics. This way, two of the world's most pressing problems - poverty and our destruction of the environment - may see some light as the clouds of single-minded capitalism retreats.

There are some other nuggets of lessons from the book, which can be summarised as follow:

1. Contrary to what organisations such as the IMF and World Bank believes (which is that the poor need advice, new regulations, capability building), the poor are able to solve their own problems if given the right resources. In fact, they only need very little resources to do so.
2. This also addresses the other myth that poor people are in their condition simply because they lack the skills (hence the capability upgrading programs). Having said that, the injection of skill can make a significant impact on bringing the poor to the next level.
   
3. One of the few resources that they can tap on - loans from moneylenders - have such high charges that it effectively enslaves the poor and perpetuates their poverty.
   
4. In this regard, microcredit is an appropriate solution to the poverty problem, by providing a cheaper resource.
   
5. Apparently, women are much less likely to default than men!

Overall, a good and very thought-provoking book! Has introduced me to the world of social businesses - let's see where this path brings me!