Yunus at the LSE

[Jeff Mowatt]

Thanks Brad for pointing to this conversation which I must have missed
earlier.

I heard some remarkable things. Not least in the mention of the
Doonesbury comic strip.

Mary Kantor refers to the image of two soldiers in Iraq, one telling
the other that he's been reading a book by Muhaamad Yunus and asks his
companion "Did you realise that we could be lifting 3 million families
out of poverty for what we spend in Iraq in a single day".

In December 2003, an American friend was protesting about poverty with
a fast. He was living in a tent and blogging about it from his local
library. He called for the US to sign up to the International Covenant
of Economic Social and Cultural Rights.

The unusual thing about this homeless blogger was that he'd been a
social entrepreneur. In 1999 travelling to Russia to recommend and
source a development project which included a microfinance bank based
on the Grameen loan circle model of moral collateral as he called it.
It leveraged 10,000 new businesses with repayments > 98% and business
survival of more than a yearhttp://www.iccrimea.org/scholarly/economicdev.html
> 99%. Then it was replicated elsewhere in Russia and Georgia before
becoming the model on which Russian Microfinance Centre was based.

Two people responded to his appeal. I was one, the other was Senator
John Edwards who soon after created the Center for Poverty Work and
Opportunity in the town where the tent protest began.

My response was to invite him to the UK where we could work together
and we created P-CED as a business for the purpose of eliminating
poverty, a guarantee company with no shares in the first instance.

The reason for his homelessness had been interference in his work.
First from a local government who tried to add their own opaque
projects to a subsequent proposal, directed at the Tatar community in
Crimea, but as far as I could tell he was also left hung out to dry by
those in the US administration who had no appetite for this work. In
an interview with a diaspora leader he explains his and now our
objectives of swords to ploughshares through a more inclusive form of
capitalism.

http://www.iccrimea.org/scholarly/economicdev.html

It was 2004 by which time Terry was back in Ukraine researching what
we had agreed to do,.just as that cartoon described, lift millions out
of poverty for the cost of less than a week spent in Iraq. In fact,
the Crimean Tatar strategy paper had painted a rather similar
scenario, that investment of $40 million in microfinance could be
compared directly with the equivalent spend on Tomahawk Cruise
missiles:

"Just as the US now heavily uses smart bombs in warfare, it is
becoming increasingly apparent that the equivalent is needed in aid
efforts. It is not enough to spend, say, US$ 7 million dollars for
five Tomahawk cruise missiles and then spend a fraction of that amount
in building a peaceful community which does not merit targeting by
missiles. Yet, that is what we have in this case."

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/ukraine/crimea/

Returning to that comic strip, this was our objective precisely, to
create a strategy plan to lift millions out of poverty for the cost of
less than a week in Iraq. It is stated in the summary of the final
product delivered in October 2006.

"It is proposed that the United States of America be actively engaged
in supporting this project, financially and any other way possible.
Ukraine has clearly demonstrated common will for democracy. Ukraine
has also unilaterally taken the first critical step to fulfill this
program, thus clearly demonstrating initiative and commitment to
participation required in the original Marshall Plan sixty years ago.
The US side is presumably attempting to foster democracy in another
country, which never expressed much interest and shows little real
interest now. That of course is Iraq, where recent estimates indicate
a cost of $1.5 billion per week.

That same amount of money, spread over five years instead of one week,
would more than cover the investment cost of the initial components of
this project, and allow a reserve fund for creating new projects as
Ukraine’s intelligentsia invents them in the Center for Social
Enterprise. It is proposed that Ukraine and the US provide equal
portions of this amount. Ukraine is certainly able to provide that
level of funding, given that projects are designed with the same
fiscal discipline employed in the traditional business sector. That
means they pay for themselves, one way or another. "

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/ukraine/national/

What I've found most astonishing in the business of business tackling
poverty has been the response from the UK across the board. For
instance, I offered our APPG (All Party Parliamentary Group) on
Microfinance a presentation of the Tomsk initiative, for their meeting
in the year of microcredit in 2005, they took 6 months to reply
declining the opportunity. Likewise the Chair of the Social Enterprise
Coalition at the time didn't reply. This was in letter form posted to
the House of Lords, where a reply is traditionally regarded as an
obligation. Terry had been refused a return to the UK on the grounds
of being a suspected economic migrant and I asked for help and was
left wanting. I had to abandon the guarantee company, with the founder
locked out and did my best to carry on alone.

Doonesbury is a comic strip in the Guardian who have never responded
to anything I'd written on the subject, though they report often on
social enterprise matters and attend the conferences. By coincidence,
they're also a customer, in another part of the Guardian Media Group,
for the software service we provide as revenue source for the
business. They have absolutely no idea, or interest in what we're
doing as a business.

Jeff

[Jeff Mowatt]

What I meant to include in the above was that the strategy paper above
which makes the case for national scale investment in social
enterprise and affordable broadband infrastructure. was copied to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee where along with the Tatar proposal
and another paper about developing fundamental science education, was
expected to be read by members who included Barack Obama and Joe
Biden.

Jeff