Hand Up rather than Hand Out

I enjoy exchanging gifts with my wife Ruth at Christmas but every once in a while we decide to unplug the Holiday Machine and count our blessings. Last year we chose to contribute some money to an organization called Oikocredit instead. Oikocredit is a micro-credit bank run by the World Council of Churches. This bank makes loans to those who can't get money from "real" banks in developing countries, so they can start businesses.

Micro-credit has been in the news a lot this year. The Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2006 is Muhammad Yunus (above). He helped start the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which has lifted millions of people out of poverty. Yunus was just in Halifax as the theme speaker at an international conference on micro-credit. I heard him on CBC radio's The Current, where he explained how he started out by loaning a few dollars to individuals who wanted to begin modest enterprises. Now millions have been helped to help themselves.

It's a great story and it has a happy ending. The repayment rate is almost a hundred percent. The vast majority of loans are made to women, who otherwise can't get credit. The next generation of loans are helping to pay for the university educations of children of those initial recipients. Philanthropists such as Bill and Melinda Gates, and the Dells are supporting micro-credit because they see it works.

A Christian micro-credit ministry called Opportunity International actually started making loans five years before Grameen Bank. Oikocredit has made 100 million euros (roughly 150 million dollars Cdn) worth of credits in the first ten months of this year. Both organizations have congratulated Yunus and Grameen. They aren't in competition -- they just want to live a gospel of justice.