Some of the major misconceptions about microfinance -- small loans of under $100 that enable Third World residents to become entrepreneurs -- can be summed up by what happened roughly a decade ago, when the pioneering Grameen Bank decided to help female villagers in Bangladesh enter the mobile phone business.
Alex Counts -- CEO of the related Grameen Foundation and keynote speaker at the recent Wharton Social Impact Conference 2007 -- said the idea met with the same concerns that have dogged the steady growth of microfinance ever since the concept emerged in the 1970s. "I remember hearing that ... this was going to be a disaster," noted Counts, an associate of Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and co-winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Critics said that when poor rural women hear a voice on the phone for the first time, "they are going to think that there is a ghost in the phone, and they are going to throw it away." If the women managed to get past that hurdle, the critics said, they wouldn't be able to understand the technology that modern cell phones use.
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