The other night I enjoyed some of the best views of San Francisco from the living room windows (who knew Twin Peaks was where it’s at for SF views?) when a gracious host opened their home so that Alex Counts, head of the Grameen Foundation USA, could speak about his new book, Small Change, Big Dreams.

My favorite story that Alex told us was about the time when Professor Yunus (head of Grameen Bank) thought it would be a good idea to start a cell phone lady business in Bangladesh.  The idea was that there weren’t a lot of phones in Bangladesh at this time so folks who lived in remote villages couldn’t connect with loved ones, like all the Bangladeshis who work in the Middle East oil fields on a seasonal basis.  So, Professor Yunus thought a great business would be for someone in the village to take a loan to buy a phone and then villagers could come to her to make calls for a fee. (more…)

MicroPlace’s Director of Product Ashwini Narayanan went to Cambodia to visit some microfinance borrowers recently.   The story of this trip got written up and published in Green Money Journal but we thought we’d put it here too, with some extra pictures included.  Enjoy.

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Ngeim Men and Ashwini Narayanan are sitting in front of a thatched house, built Khmer style on stilts, about 80 km outside of Phnom Phen.  “I learned to make this from my mother,” Ngeim Men says as she weaves. “This is my business. I make baskets and sell them in the market.” (more…)