The Robin Hood Tax is the UK version of the Tobin Tax which was at the beginning of ATTAC in France ten years ago.

As an anti-poverty campaign, it is more pragmatic than the economic theories of Tobin Tax definitions or the political demands of the Attac network.

Supported by a coalition of 48 organisations, the Robin Hood Tax campaign spells out what the income should be spent on.

And in the spirit of our times, it uses Twitter and YouTube.

The video is set to private until the launch which is set to 0.05am in parallel with the 0.05% tax that Robin Hood wants to take.

However, Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, dismissed the idea of a Tobin Tax only recently, according to the FT.

Of course, this tax doesn’t get to the root of all evils, but at least it’s bound to capture people’s imagination!

Updates here.

Ah Ha!!! This guy is on to something. I now have another link to add to the “Get Involved Links” Curtis Stephen from the New York City paper City Limits introduces us to Darryl Penrice.

Darryl Penrice likes to talk. His preferred topics of conversation can roam anywhere from the music of the late rapper Tupac Shakur and the murky underside of politics in America to the mechanics of microeconomics. But if there’s one subject that the 32-year-old Brooklyn resident and self-professed “ghetto prodigy” loves to discuss more than anything else, it’s a vision of a new way to fight poverty that he’s obsessed with making real.

For the past year, Penrice has been anything but silent about his proposal, meeting with an assortment of potential investors, city officials, nonprofit groups, college students and major grant-making institutions. In the midst of an outreach campaign, Penrice has been trying to earn support – especially the financial kind – to transform the website that he’s created from a prototype into a full-scale, anti-poverty platform that he contends will have a significant impact in the lives of people experiencing economic hardship in New York and well beyond. “I know what I have,” Penrice declares. “I’m not the most religious person in the world, but if God gave me a gift then I’m going to share it. This is something that can feed millions of people.”

Penrice plans for his initiative – an interactive website called Poverty’s Demise.org (or as he calls it, “PDO”) – to combine the open source atmosphere of Craigslist with the opportunity-expanding aims of Kiva.org, which allows for “microfinance” lending to entrepreneurs in developing countries. But in many respects, if Penrice’s ambitious plan ever goes live, it will launch an unprecedented Web-based undertaking.

Penrice envisions PDO as an outlet for person-to-person financial transactions in which donors help economically disadvantaged individuals – who have been screened and approved for participation – and struggling working-class families pay for essential daily living expenses, including everything from food and rent to utility bills and child care costs. Under the proposal, which Penrice details extensively on his website, the tax-deductible donations would be sent to recipients in the form of “universally redeemable” bar-coded certificates to be exchanged at participating retailers and service providers for specific goods and services. Incentives are also provided to both donors and recipients for volunteerism, and the purchase of healthy food and environmentally-friendly products.

The PDO model would also help to ease the burden faced by those on public assistance and seniors, both of whom are subjected to often-frustrating bureaucracies, Penrice charges. “The government is spending billions right now, but nothing is being done to fix a system that isn’t very efficient,” he says. “A lot of people are against welfare, but how can we tolerate a society where people who worked for 40 or 50 years are forced to choose between their medication or groceries?”

As he seeks to create a high-tech community-oriented platform that circumvents government and nonprofit social services, Penrice is clearly aiming big. He’s hoping to land an investment of $4 million to make an initial run. In addition to setting up an office, hiring programmers and sparking the first wave of donations, Penrice plans to focus on New Yorkers in need before branching out nationwide. One endeavor that Penrice hopes to launch through PDO is a program he calls Broader Horizons, where disadvantaged families are sent abroad. “Can you imagine taking a kid from Bed-Stuy and dropping him off in Japan for a week? The problem with generational poverty is that Dad is in jail, Mom is smoked out, and you think the whole world is a ghetto.”

1. the excellent Poverty News Blog
2. the SlideShare contest on the credit crunch where I shall submit a version of what I presented recently here
3. the invitation of the Treasury Select Committee to send questions regarding what they call the “banking crisis” to bankingcrisis@parliament.uk
4. maybe you’d like to sign our online petition targeted at the Treasury Select Committee? See http://tinyurl.com/666rwd

But nobody has set a better example and achieved better results within the constraints of our capitalist system than Dr. Yunus!

I still think that my most promising initiative is our online petition Stop the Cash Crumble to Equalize the Credit Crunch.

Should you want to participate in Blog Action Day, go here.

Publisher description
A comprehensive look at the concept of micro-financing
Micro-financing is considered one of the most effective strategies in the fight against global poverty. It can be implemented on the massive scale necessary to respond to the urgent needs of the world’s poorest. And now, in Small Loans, Big Changes, author Alex Counts looks at the lives of micro-lending borrowers from the Grameen Foundation in Bangladesh and Chicago. All of the borrowers profiled here are women of little-to-no means, each struggling to gain financial independence. Readers will discover how, in Bangladesh, these women face off against very poor living conditions and the prejudice of men, while in Chicago, they must overcome crime and other hurdles that come with life in the inner city. Written in a straightforward and accessible style, Small Loans, Big Changes reveals how Muhammad Yunus and his concept of micro-financing has helped those living in poverty achieve real financial independence.
Alex Counts (Washington, DC) is President and CEO of Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit, Washington, D.C.-based organization that has grown from modest beginnings in 1997 to become a global network of 52 micro-finance partners in 22 countries. He trained to be a catalyst for change under Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the founder and Managing Director of the Grameen Bank and corecipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Table of Contents

Foreword.
Acknowledgments.
Introduction to the 2008 Edition.
Introduction to the First Edition.
Chapter 1. Muhammad Yunus -From Vanderbilt To Chittagong.
Chapter 2. The Birth Of The Grameen Bank.
Chapter 3. Zianpur Bazaar.
Chapter 4. Las Papillons.
Chapter 5. Amena Begum’s Dream.
Chapter 6. Omiyale Dupart.
Chapter 7. The Haldar Para.
Chapter 8. The Maxwell Street Market.
Chapter 9. Krishna Das Bala.
Chapter 10. The Hip Hop Shop.
Chapter 11. Dry Money in a Monsoon.
Chapter 12. The Black on Black Love Festival.
Chapter 13. The Sixteen Decisions.
Chapter 14. âœWe’re Here For Youâ .
Epilogue.
Appendix A.
Notes.
About the Author.
Index.

Alex Counts bio

Alex Counts is President and CEO of the Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit, Washington, D.C.-based organization that has grown from modest beginnings in 1997 to become a global network of forty-six microfinance partners in twenty-four countries. Under his leadership, the Grameen Foundation impacts an estimated eighteen million lives in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Arab World. Counts trained to be a catalyst for change under Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the founder and Managing Director of the Grameen Bank and corecipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

By John Sentamu
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 25/09/2008

We all know that UNICEF has described the life-threatening consequences that children face as a result of poor education.

Only one in a hundred of girls like these will receive a primary education

We also know that more than 50 years ago the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed education to be a basic human right.

We all agree about the vital need for education, particularly for the world’s poor. But what these children need is not our rhetoric of agreement but practical action now to make it happen.

We think that we have progressed, but the evidence shows that in many parts of the world (including the West) poverty and oppression result in things being very much the same. We are half way to the 2015 Millennium Development Goals and yet 75 million children remain out of school completely. Twice as many, many of them girls, go for a short while but then drop out. We think we are making progress but the facts are that too many children around the world are receiving inadequate education and in many cases, no education at all.

This is a scandal for many reasons. Children are our future. If we do not educate our children, what hope can there be for the future? But it is a also a scandal because it shows just how wrong our priorities have become.
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# George Pitcher: Archbishops should note balance between serving God and Mammon
# Jasmine Whitbread: Why not raise $25 bn for dying children?

The President of the United States recently announced a $700 billion bail-out plan for banks and financial institutions. One of the ironies about the financial crisis is that it makes action on poverty look utterly achievable. It would cost $5 billion to save six million children’s lives. World leaders could find 140 times that amount for the banking system in a week. How can they now tell us that action for the poorest on the planet is too expensive?

As citizens, and as children of God, we need to build a society where each individual can flourish and become the whole person they were created to be. Education is part of that transformative process for us to become fully human.

Education is about finding out who we are, where we belong, and what the purpose of our lives is. It is not just about acquiring knowledge and skills – the root of “education” is “educare”, which means to “draw out”. We need to draw out from every person in every country, the gifts and potential they possess. As Christians, as educators, as human beings, our calling is to help others to attain their full humanity – not to beat them in the race but to share with them the prize.

I have the privilege to be the patron of a charity (the Edith Jackson Trust) working to build a primary school in the Diocese of Rokon in southern Sudan.

The civil war in Sudan lasted for more than two decades. Since the Peace agreement signed in 2005 there has been progress, but not enough. There are continued atrocities in Darfur and a need for continued UN Action, not least that supported by the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Southern Sudan has emerged from a 21-year conflict with a semi-autonomous government and a hope of lasting peace. However, with widespread littering of mines, millions of displaced people, and an education and health structure destroyed by war, the South is building from scratch and its future remains far from secure.

The work of the leadership of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has been instrumental in rebuilding that country. However the educational challenges that remain are enormous.

Southern Sudan has the lower access to education than any other country in the world, with only 20 per cent of children enrolling at primary school and less than 2 per cent completing primary education.

For girls, this figure is less than 1 per cent. As a result 92 per cent of southern Sudanese women and 80 per cent of men are illiterate.

A UNICEF report in 2004 uncovered the shocking fact that girls in southern Sudan are more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than complete primary education.

To put it another way, one in nine women dies in pregnancy or childbirth but only one in a hundred girls completes primary school.

One of the reasons why primary school completion rates are so low is that there are so few school buildings. Only 15 per cent of schools in southern Sudan have permanent classrooms and many are in the open. It cannot be underestimated how important the commitment and permanence of a school building is for morale and community confidence in education. This is why there is such a desperate need for new education facilities.

Another reason is the shortage of trained teachers. That is why the Anglican Church has pioneered and pushed forward recruitment to teaching and the training of teachers in a country which has one of the lowest rates of enrolment for teachers in the world.

The newly formed Government of Southern Sudan (GOSS) has made primary education a priority but they simply don’t have the resources to make any meaningful impact. GOSS is increasingly reliant on agencies and the church to try to fill the void, which is why individual charities such as the Edith Jackson Trust — amongst many others — are working in partnership with the Episcopal Church of Sudan to build a primary school in Rokon.

Education is required not only in schools but across the country more generally. It is why it is so essential that we take the decisions now at the UN that can transform these children’s lives.

Today we need to remember that we who have received the benefits of education have a responsibility to those who went before and those who come after us. That responsibility is to pass on the learning and discernment and wisdom, and to ensure all children are able to receive the benefits of that education.

We all have the potential to wield immense power — and this power is given to us by God for the benefit of the whole of humanity. The world’s poor are waiting. And there is something that we all can do to help. It’s “Topping Up for the world’s poor – Deposit the Difference”.

What does that mean? Well, imagine that every time you bought something, you could arrange to top up your bills by a few pennies to the nearest pound above, and deposit the difference into a fund for educating the poor children of the world. Then imagine that each month you could arrange that any spare pence above the last pound of your total salaries be taken off and you could deposit the difference in the same fund.

Next, imagine that your example was taken up by everyone in the country, and that together we could help ensure that all those extra pennies could be channelled into areas of need – especially into education and health for the word’s poor.

I’m grateful to the Global Exchange for Social Investment, that this is an idea which is already being developed. For me, its appeal is that it would generate a large scale effect from a realistically small scale effort. From a tiny acorn we would produce a mighty oak and it is a financial campaign in which everyone can have a part.

Dr. John Sentamu is Archbishop of York.

02 September 2008
Microloans Enable Many Bolivians to Become Entrepreneurs

Microfinance is fastest-growing business in South America’s poorest country

By Phillip Kurata
Staff Writer

Washington — Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, has devised a system of microfinance lending that offers poor, often illiterate people the chance to become self-sustaining entrepreneurs.

One such entrepreneur is Flora Callisaya, a 38-year-old single mother of three boys aged 12, 14, and 18. The mother and her boys used to live with Callisaya’s parents as she struggled to support her family. She received her first loan of $17 from the Pro Mujer microfinance institution (MFI), which requires its members to participate in a savings program.

Callisaya used her initial loan to buy materials for a printing business. From that modest beginning, she expanded her enterprise to include a photography studio and dishware and gift boxes that she sells in the market. Her loan now is $1,122.

Thanks to Pro Mujer’s mandatory savings program, Callisaya has bought her own land and a house. She has served as president of the communal bank that the MFI helped organize.

“Pro Mujer is like school for us. Here we can see each other, have fun, relax and learn. For us Pro Mujer is a place we can be together,” Callisaya said, according to the Pro Mujer Web site.

Inter-American Development Bank seed financing has played an important role in the Bolivian and similar microfinance systems throughout the region.

“Microfinance lending is the fastest growing and most profitable sector of the Bolivian economy for the past quarter century,” said Sandra Darville of IDB. “Loan repayment rate is very high. If they want another loan, they have to repay the first one.”

Bolivia seized and redistributed land, nationalized mines and natural gas reserves and imposed exchange rate and price controls from the 1950s to the 1980s with the aim of spurring economic growth, but to little avail.

Then, in the 1980s, Bolivia reversed course and embraced market-based reforms — lifting price controls, encouraging foreign trade, selling off state enterprises and closing unprofitable mines. Those measures stabilized the economy but did not induce economic growth. Poverty remained high, and the rural poor migrated to the cities in search of better economic prospects. Witness the growth of El Alto, a city near the capital, La Paz, from a population of 100,000 to more than 1 million over 15 years.

On the streets of El Alto, as well as other Bolivian cities, vendors sell fruits, vegetables, televisions, refrigerators and clothing. These street businesses are part of the “informal” economy, which provides the livelihood for more than 60 percent of the population.

To enable laid-off miners, landless peasants and others of the impoverished underclass to support themselves, donor countries, charities and the Bolivian government developed ways of identifying prospective entrepreneurs and loaning them small sums of money to launch businesses. Thus was born the microfinance industry, and the collapse of the myth that poor, illiterate people were poor credit risks. The default rate on microloans is less than 5 percent.

About 1 million Bolivians have taken out microloans from about 20 MFIs. Throughout the Latin America and Caribbean region, about 8 million people have taken out microloans, amounting to about $9 billion.

The 2004 Special Summit of the Americas affirmed its support for IDB lending through the banking system to micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises. A summit statement praised IDB for “striving to benefit all of the countries that participate in the Summit of the Americas process.”

Referring to Bolivian microloan recipients, the IDB’s Sergio Navajas said, “These people are very, very poor, but they have viable businesses. The key to microfinance is having methodology that distinguishes legitimate business people from would-be beggars.”

“MFIs are part of the financial system,” Darville said. “Certainly, they are sustainable. They have grown, taking deposits, offering checking accounts. Some issue bonds and shares. Increasingly, they are part of the domestic and international capital markets. [Credit rating company] Standard and Poor’s has begun rating them for their credit risk.”

The microfinance lenders form close ties with borrowers, getting to know them and their communities. Often loans are extended to groups, creating “moral collateral” in the absence of material assets. If one person defaults on a loan, then the other members of the group are responsible for repayment. The social network minimizes the default rate.

The interest rates on microloans in Bolivia have fallen from around 60 percent a year in the 1990s to 19 percent now, according to Navajas. As business people have seen that microfinance is a viable service industry, competition has grown and lowered the cost of borrowing, he said.

Most of the microloan recipients are women — by coincidence rather than design, according to Darville, although some MFIs deal exclusively with women. The reason that women constitute the majority of the borrowers is that most microfinance loans go for retail businesses, such as small grocery stores, bakeries, handicrafts, restaurants and market stalls, where women predominate.

But poverty begins at home: in the UK I have not only met many victims of banks and other institutions but also of lawyers! When people, especially farmers, commit suicide because of overindebtedness, bankruptcies or other financial pressures we ought to look at what can be done here, at our doorstep.

The Oxford Research Group has published Beyond Terror to illustrate how climate change is a much more real danger than potential acts from terrorists.

The Forum for Stable Currencies has published a Public Credit Petition to raise awareness among the general public, journalists and politicians about the questionable scarcity of money when ‘green money’ is badly needed.

Will you click and sign?

FT.com / World – Microfinance commercialisation warning

Microfinance commercialisation warning

By Tom Burgis in Johannesburg

Published: July 29 2008 01:56 | Last updated: July 29 2008 01:56

The world’s biggest banks risk creating a subprime-style crisis for millions of the planet’s poorest people if they continue to plough money into the booming microfinance sector, Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel laureate pioneer of microcredit, warned on Monday.

In a broadside against the increasing commercialisation of microfinance, Mr Yunus said overseas investors only served to introduce foreign exchange risks and should stay out of the sector.

“If you build it up that there’s a lot of money to make you can get a subprime kind of thing, but this time it’s the really poor people who will be in trouble,” Mr Yunus said in answer to a question from the Financial Times while speaking to reporters from a microfinance summit in Indonesia.

The gathering of microfinanciers announced a voluntary transparency drive under which willing institutions will submit details of the interest rates they charge on their loans. Mr Yunus’s Grameen Bank is the biggest of several lenders serving a total of 20m clients to commit to the scheme.

While comprehensive data are scarce, since its origins in Bangladesh 30 years ago, according to the most recent figures compiled by the Washington-based Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) there were by 2006 at least 77m microfinance borrowers in 100 countries. JPMorgan calculated last year demand for financial services among poor people was worth as much as $300bn.

Loans are offered to groups who are unable to provide collateral, rendering them “unbankable” in the eyes of most traditional bankers.

Yet in recent years many of the world’s foremost financial institutions – among them Citigroup, Barclays, Morgan Stanley and BNP Paribas – have entered the fray, either by opening credit lines to microfinance institutions, taking equity stakes in them or creating funds that allow investors to gain exposure to the fast-growing field.

Outstanding wholesale loans from 17 leading international commercial lenders to microfinance institutions more than doubled to between $1.1bn and $1.4bn in the year to the end of 2007, according to a recent report commissioned by ING, the Dutch lender which itself has a microfinance presence.

That compares with MIX’s estimate of a gross loan portfolio held by some 1,100 major microfinanciers of $24bn.

Other commercial banks, including several in Africa, are moving downmarket to cater directly to clients once the sole preserve of microfinance.

The growing commercialisation of the sector was underscored last year when Compartamos of Mexico became the first microfinance lender to go to the market, with a $467m initial public offering – a move it defended as the only way to meet the huge demand that still goes untapped.

But many in the industry fear that with the introduction of the profit motive to what was once a strictly not-for-profit endeavor is driving reckless lending at exorbitant interest rates of the kind that led to the meltdown of the US subprime mortgage market.

“When you are making profits you are moving into the mentality of the loan shark,” Mr Yunus said. “We are trying to get that loan shark out.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Brazilian President Lula da Silva has sought assistance from Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus to develop microcredit programme for the poor in Brazil, particularly for the poorest regions of the country.

He also focused on the poverty alleviation programmes of the Brazilian government when Professor Yunus met him at Alvorada Palace in Brasilia on Thursday, says a press release.

During the meeting, Professor Yunus briefed the president on the Grameen Bank programmes. Professor Yunus, who visited Brazil from June 11 to 14 at the invitation of the Brazilian Senate, also addressed the plenary session of the Senate where he spoke of the activities of the Grameen Bank.

The speech was telecast live throughout the country on the Senate TV Channel.

Following the address at the Senate, Professor Yunus was received at Alvorada Palace by President Lula.

During the two-hour meeting attended by cabinet ministers and senators, they discussed development issues ranging from poverty alleviation, healthcare, food crisis, ways of increasing agricultural productivity, climate change and the environment and other common issues facing both Bangladesh and Brazil.

Prof Yunus briefed President Lula on healthcare intiatives of Grameen and sought his advice and assistance based on Brazilian experience to bring healthcare to the poor in Bangladesh.

Vice Minister Dr Gerson Pennay briefed Yunus on the healthcare programmes in Brazil.
President Lula also promised to send his health minister to Bangladesh in the near future.

Later, the agricultural minister joined the meeting and discussed how to increase agricultural productivity in developing countries such as Bangladesh.

Professor Yunus told President Lula that he represented the voice of all developing countries of the world on environmental issues and the rights of the poor.

President Lula said Brazil had a lot to learn from the successes in Bangladesh.