Jos mies ja nainen olisivat suiki samanluontoisia ja niinmuodoin katsoisivat asioita samoilla silmillä; jos heidän tunteensa, ajatustapansa, taipumuksensa, tarpeensa olisivat samanlaiset, siinä tapauksessa ei naiset niinkään tärkeästi tarvitsisi eikä vaatisi äänenvuoroa yhteiskunnassa.
Näin naisten äänioikeutta perusteli Lucina Hagman vuonna 1889.
Samoin sanoin voidaan tänä päivänä perustella pyrkimystä lisätä naisten osuutta kansanedustajiemme joukossa. Kiinalaisen sanonnan mukaan naiset kannattelevat puolta taivasta, eikö olisikin jo aika, että naiset kannattelisivat puolta vastuuta yhteisistä asioista ja niiden tulevaisuudesta. Pätevyyttä ja rohkeutta suomalaisilta naisilta ei ainakaan puutu. Nyt on sinun vuorosi kantaa kortesi kekoon. Sopivia ehdokkaita löytyy joka puolueen listoilta.
Tämän vetoomuksen kirjoitti Anna-Leena Asikainen, joka on väitteli kansantaloustieteestä 2005 äänestyskäyttäytymisestä ja puolueiden suosiosta. Laita viestiä vapaasti eteenpäin.
9.1.07
Grameen Bank: The pioneer to break the male control in the Bangladeshi society
by VTL Khan Md. Anichul Hoque
Doctoral student in economics at the University of Helsinki
Bangladesh today is one of the most moderate Muslim countries in the world. About 90% of its total population of about 140 million are Muslims. 8o% of its total population lives in rural areas, most being very poor.
Nobel Peace Laureate, 2006, Dr Yunus officially started his Micro-credit project of Grameen Bank in 1983. At that time the rural women would stay mostly at home and take care of kitchen work and nurture their children. Most of the families did not find necessary the education of their female children. Some well-to-do families used to allow education for their female children but in most cases their education was just to marry them with good bride-grooms.
On the other hand, men used to do the work outside home. So, they were the main bread winners and the heads of the families. This custom was more or less followed by rural people regardless of their religion.
The extent to which men controlled their families and the society was high amongst the Muslim community. This was so because the Mullahs (the religious leaders) had created decrees requiring that women must not be seen by other men unless they were very close relatives. Staying inside the home was the best way to do this. Outside the home women were to use the veil. Although many moderate Muslims didn’t follow this decree, they however agreed that men should have control over the women in the family.
These customs made women powerless and helpless economically too. There was little they could do to help the family out of poverty. Indeed, it was men who were blamed for the poverty of the family in this culture. About 80% of the families were poor. One of the core problems maintaining poverty is that women were not allowed to work to improve the financial condition of the family.
Dr. Yunus realized that empowering women was necessary to improve the financial condition of the poor families. To do this he started to provide micro-credit loans to the women. This was a really challenging task in the beginning. In fact, his work threatened to break the men controlled society. We can understand the difficulty of the job from Yunus's text below:
“Nurjahan and Jannat are the two students who worked with me while I was trying to do something in the next door village.... I could not communicate with the women in the village, because they would not see me. If I had to tell them what I had in mind, [Nurjahan or Jannat] would go inside the house, explain what I said, get their response, come out, while I’m waiting under the tree, and explain what their questions are. I would tell them what I had to say. This is how our work began....
When they [Nurjahan or Jannat] took up the jobs, they couldn’t tell their families they were working. Because as a Muslim girl, you are not supposed to work. You are getting a master’s degree, but then wait for getting married. Nurjahan had to hide from her family that she worked for an experimental project that required her to go door-to-door to poor families in the village on foot....”
It was a risky job for himself personally. For instance, if you saw the TV program showed in Finnish TV (10.12.2006), you could see how the Mullahs tried to agitate men to prevent Grameen Bank’s micro-credit project. Besides the religious leaders, a large part of ordinary men tried to prevent the project. Religious class tried to persuade people by saying that this project would hurt Islam in two ways. First, women would come out of the house to become visible to men and secondly men would lose control over women. All of those men claimed that the project would make women come out of men’s control. Thank God that they could not stop Dr. Yunus and he survived with his project.
Today Grameen Bank has about 7 millions micro-credit borrowers. 97% of them are women. 99% of the loans are paid back. According to their own internal survey, 58 per cent of Grameen borrowers' families have crossed the poverty line. The remaining families are moving steadily towards the poverty line from below.
Grameen system familiarizes the borrowers with the election process as well. In 2003, local government (Union Porishad) election 7,442 Grameen members competed for the reserved seats for women and 3,059 members got elected. They constitute 24 per cent of the total members elected in the seats reserved for women members in the Union Porishad local government. The source of the above data is http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/GBGlance.htm.
The above mentioned TV program was showing the current reactions of the people who stood against micro credits at the beginning of the project. Their latest reactions were very positive. For instance, one Mullah was saying that Islam still requires women to stay inside home, but in practice people are not that much against the Grameen projects since the families are having better lives and improved financial conditions today.
There are many reasons why the micro-credit program has succeeded. The typical explanations given are strong monitoring network by employing enough bank staff, providing group based lending which enables monitoring among the group members, giving continuous advice and training to the borrowers by the bank staff and so on.
I find another reason for this success. They are the women, not men, who suffered every moment with their poverty stricken children, to whom they gave birth. They had to bear the grief of their children’s hungriness, pain of their sick children lacking enough treatment or medicine, and so on. The men , the heads of the households, of most of such poverty stricken families stay outside home for most of the day (morning to evening). They even stay outside for many days or weeks in search of work or to do work. When I visited my country last time, I met many men who had left their families to look for a job. I asked: ‘How is your family surviving when you have been away from them for the past two weeks’. Many of those men replied to me: “God will keep them alive”. At this stage, when the women get the loan, they do not leave any stones un-turned to make the life of their children better. They do everything possible to be successful with their project. They took the micro-credit loan as their last resort to get beyond the poverty circle.
In the end, it is really the amazing how the women’s empowerment has moved millions of poor families out of poverty in Bangladesh. That is changing the whole society.
7.1.07
Muhammad Yunus markkinatalouden käsitteellisistä rajoituksista ja köyhyydestä
Juha-Pekka Raeste siteeraa (HS, 21.12.2006) Muhammed Yunusin Nobel-esitelmässään esittämiä ajatuksia köyhyyden syistä.
Yunus muistutti Nobel-puheessaan mm. että 94 % maailman tuloista menee 40 prosentille maailman ihmisistä. Hän näkee nykytilan karmeana ihmisoikeuksia loukkaavana vahinkona, joka on korjattavissa.
Vahingon syy ei Yunusin mukaan ole niinkään vapaassa markkinataloudessa, vaan niissä käsitteellisissä rajoituksissa ja kehikoissa, joihin talouden eri pelaajat yritetään istuttaa. 'Tämä tulkinta kapitalismista eristää yrittäjät kaikesta poliittisesta, tunneperäisestä, sosiaalisesta, henkisestä ja ympäristöön liittyvistä ulottuvuuksista heidän elämässään', sanoo Yunus. Raeste jatkaa: 'Yunusin mukaan liiketoiminnan tavoitteiden yksinkertaistaminen on ehkä tehty osin perustelluistakin syistä, mutta samalla tulee karsittua pois juuri ihmiselon kaikkein olennaisimmat asiat. Yunusin arvion mukaan kapitalismin yksinkertaistamiseen on ajauduttu siksi, että vapaan markkinatalouden menestys on ollut niin vakuuttavaa. Kapitalismin perustuksia ei siksi ole tohdittu viime aikoina kyseenalaistaa. Ja mikä pahempaa, olemme tehneet parhaamme muuttaaksemme itsemme, niin tarkoin kuin mahdollista, yksiulottaisiksi ihmisiksi, jotta vapaa markkinatalous saisi toimia sujuvammin'.
'Kapitalismin olemusta on kuitenkin Yunusin mukaan helppo muuttaa - yksinkertaisesti määrittelemällä yrittäjän käsite uudelleen. Siihen riittää jo se, että yrittäjällä olisi yhden motivaation lähteen, esimerkiksi voitontavoittelun sijaan kaksi tavoitetta, kuten voiton tavoittelua ja hyvän tekeminen ihmisille ja koko maailmalle. Jälkimmäistä Yunus kutsuu sosiaaliseksi liiketoiminnaksi jonka tarkoitus on muuttaa maailmaa. Siinä sijoituksista ei oteta osinkoja, van tuotot sijoitetaan takaisin yhtiöön kasvua tai laadun parannusta ajatellen. Ajatusmallin hyvänä puolena on se, että näin moni ihminen, joka ei motivoidu pelkästä ahneudesta, voi käyttää lahjakkuuttaan paremman maailman luomiseen. Yunusin mukaan köyhyyden poistaminen on puhtaasti tahto- ja paneutumiskysymys.
Lopuksi Yunus vertasi köyhiä bonsai-puihin:
' Kun pisimmän puun parhaan siemenen panee kukkaruukkuun, saa korkeimman puun pienoismallin, vain parin tuuman kokoisen. Siemenessä ei ole mitään vikaa, vain kasvualusta on riittämätön. Köyhät ovat bonsai-puita. Heidän siemenissään ei ole vikaa. Täytyy vain tarjota se kasvualusta. Kun köyhät voivat vapauttaa energiansa ja luovuutensa, köyhyys katoaa hyvin nopeasti.'
Koko puheen voit lukea tai katsoa tästä.
