【正文】 ounderDirector, Professor Muhammad Yunus, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. By the end of February 2020 it had million clients and outstanding loans of $545 million. By any measure it is an organisation that has impacted greatly on the lives of many poor people and on ideas about microfinance, poverty reduction and international development. The groupbased lending model, targeted at poor, rural women, that is synonymous with the Grameen Bank contrasts markedly with the two other iconic microfinance institutions, Bank Rakyat Indonesia and BancoSol of Bolivia. The original Grameen Bank model es out of what Robinson calls a ‘poverty lending’ approach, rather than the ‘financial systems’ approach that she, the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), and many US microfinance specialists prefer. However, unnoticed by many observers, the Grameen Bank made dramatic changes to its services around 2020 and 2020. Its new model (Grameen II), takes it much closer to a financial systems approach. Although Professor Yunus continues to champion the idea of microfinance for poor women, most obviously through the annual Microcredit Summit, the Bank he directs increasingly lends to nonpoor clients, has moved aggressively into savings mobilisation, and is very much concerned with the overall profitability of the mix of its products. Grameen II reflects not so much a reform as a revolution in the Grameen’s strategy. Rather than challenging the marketbased ‘financial systems approach’ the contemporary Grameen Bank vindicates it. But, let us start at the beginning. Early days As Professor Yunus reports in his autobiography (Yunus, 1999), and as Fuglesang and Chandler (1986) record, the origins of the Grameen Bank lie in the dilemma that the young Yunus found himself facing in the mid1970s. Having pleted his PhD in the USA, he had returned to Bangladesh to lecture in economics at Chittagong University. However, he found himself wondering what relevance the economic theory he taught had to the immediate needs of the thousands of hungry and deprived people he saw in rural Bangladesh. The country was slowly recovering from a vicious war of independence that had destroyed its infrastructure and its productivity and murdered much of its intelligentsia. The damage caused by the war had been amplified by the famine of 1974, and the country was dependent on food aid. Human suffering on a vast scale could be witnessed in any town or village. Yunus could try to help people by giving them charity, but he wondered whether some of his economic theory could be applied in the field. His training postulated that if people got access to credit they could increase their profitability, or diversify their economic activities, in ways that would allow them to raise their ines. So, if he could lend some poor people his money they could improve their lives and pay him back. Then, he could lend the money to other poor people and thus assist many more people than could be achieved by simply giving his money away. It was an interesting theory, but his initial experiments seemed to show it was invalid. Quite a few of the men and women he lent to did not repay their small loans (sums of US$10 or 20). He thought that this was because they had either used the money unwisely (for consumption or poorly planned microenterprises) or were not trustworthy. As a result, he began to experiment with ways of (i) approving and supervising loans, to ensure they would be used for productive investments, and (ii) selecting trustworthy clients and managing them, so that they would repay their loans. Eventually he came up with a model that worked. This had a number of features: ? Lending to poor, rural women (as they were less likely than men to use loans badly and were more reliable for repayment). ? Organising women into cells of five, that took collective res