AT FIRST, Scott Leckman was just hoping to save some children. Not every child in the world, but some. He was positive it was possible to save some of the 12 million children who were dying each year of simple things, such as diarrhea and diseases that have vaccines.
Leckman is a Salt Lake physician. He was one of a number of activists who, a decade ago, began lobbying their members of Congress to get just 1 percent of U.S. foreign aid money dedicated to vaccines and oral rehydration solution - which is a simple mixture of sugar, salt and clean water.Leckman became a local leader in a national lobbying group called Results. He learned how to talk to his elected officials. He learned how to approach editorial writers.
He and the other Results activists saw success quite quickly. Beginning in the mid-1980s, a portion of U.S. foreign aid funds were redirected toward child survival. Those funds continue to be protected today, and Results volunteers continue to lobby to make sure they stay in the budget.
Yet at the same time they were starting to be successful, the Results volunteers began to realize that oral rehydration solution is not the total solution.
More children are surviving, yes. However, they aren't getting enough to eat, and they're not able to go to school because their families are too poor.
These days, the Results volunteers are talking about microcredit. If oral rehydration solution is a simple idea, so too is microcredit.
If you were to stop by Dr. Leckman's office, in the St. Mark's Hospital complex, you would notice photos of women in saris on the walls of his waiting room. He took these photos in Bangladesh, where he went to see the miracle firsthand.
Often his patients will ask him about the photos, which gives him the opening to talk about his latest passion.
He likes to tell his patients all about microcredit. About how the Grameen Bank makes the smallest of loans to the poorest of women. About how lives are changed and poverty is erased, one family at a time.
If you are sitting in Leckman's office, and if you show an interest in ending world poverty, he might also give you a book. He has stacks of them, in tidy piles right near his desk.
One book, with a red and blue cover, talks about Results and about how people across the United States are reclaiming democracy by talking to their congressional representatives and actually making an impact on foreign aid, an area of government seemingly beyond the pale of personal influence.
There is also a green book. "Give Us Credit" tells the story of Muhammad Yunus, a Fulbright schol-ar and economist who went home to his native Bangladesh in 1972, when his country was at an economic and political low.
Yunus believed in his people, thought they needed not more charity but a chance to work their way out of poverty. He saw how the culture - in which few women owned property and fathers tended to control the money and spend it outside the home and moneylenders charged 400 percent interest - was keeping people poor.
Yunus set up a peer loan system. Five or six poor women form a group for moral support and financial accountability. The first person in the group to get a loan has to be paying it off before the second person can get her loan.
Yunus made the first series of loans himself. He got government money for his second series of loans. He saw a 98 percent repayment rate. Today, the bank he started (Grameen means "village bank") is self-supporting and solid and is owned by the people who use it.
Meanwhile, in South America another microlending program was seeing similar success. Accion gives individual loans as well as peer-group loans, and it also sees a 98 percent repayment rate. Accion also began with charitable support. But many of the banks - in Peru and Bolivia, to name just two - long ago began financing themselves through interest and fees from borrowers.
Soon people like Leckman and the Results volunteers learned of microcredit. They wanted to see it happen on a larger scale in the Third World. They wondered how the idea would work in the United States.
They have come to see mi-cro-credit the same way Yunus sees it: Credit is an inalienable human right. Mothers will always work hard to feed their children.
It's simple, for those who believe. You give a poor woman a loan. She uses the money to buy a cow. Or she buys some chickens. Or she buys some reeds.
She'll sell milk. Or she'll sell eggs. Or she'll weave a basket and sell it and use profits to buy more reeds.
Last spring, at a meeting of the Utah Women's Forum, David Nimkin and Anne Milliken and Annette Cumming explained what is happening with microcredit in Utah.
In Bangladesh, microcredit began with loans of less than $50 being given to the poorest of the poor. In Utah, microcredit began with loans of less than $10,000 being given to entrepreneurs with a plan for a small business, a business too small and an owner to unproven to get a loan through a regular bank.
Nimkin, the head of the Utah Microenterprise Loan Fund's board of directors, explained how they have recently been meeting with a group of community volunteers. Meeting to discuss how their fund might serve a poorer kind of local entrepreneur.
The Utah Microenterprise Loan Fund, a private endeavor started by a consortium of local banks, has issued more than 100 loans. Now the goal is to take it smaller. Now the goal is to seek out the poorest of the poor: mothers on welfare. People without a business plan, but people who might already have found a way to augment their income - by selling oranges out of the back of their car, perhaps, or selling cinnamon rolls out of their kitchen.
Nimkin, president of the UMLF board; Milliken, UMLF credit committee member, and Cumming, who heads up a community group interested in local poverty, had all recently been to a microcredit summit in Washington, D.C.
They spoke with some enthusiasm about how microcredit has reached 10 million families already. And at the summit people from all over the world pledged themselves to reach 100 million families by the year 2005.
They spoke with enthusiasm, but not as much enthusiasm as a voice that soon piped up from the back of the room. It was Scott Leckman. He too had been to the summit and he wanted to make it as simple as possible for the listeners to understand.
He said, "What we are talking about here is ending poverty. Ending world poverty."
Nimkin has met with leaders of other microcredit groups - and there are more than 400 different experiments going on now, some based on the Grameen model, some based on the Accion model, none based on the Utah model.
So now he is talking with others about how the Utah plan - larger small businesses - might be applicable in the rest of the country and about what others have learned about working with welfare mothers.
Lynn McMullen, the director of the national Results, talked about microlending from her office in Washington, D.C. While it's done amazing things in Third World countries, she says, the U.S. economy is more industrialized and there are laws against, say, buying a cow and selling milk on a corner of a downtown street.
Like Nimkin, she's heard the number 10 percent. Some analysts believe not more than 10 percent of women on welfare in the United States might want to be small business owners.
And then, too, there are the cautionary notes such as the one sounded in The Economist, which says the biggest threat to microlending is overly rapid expansion.
Still, McMullen knows it will work for some individual Americans. And even peer groups in New York and Chicago have proved effective. Microlending is amazing. "But it's not a panacea," she says. And that's why Results is, even now, looking at other community renewal programs in the United States, getting excited about all sorts of new ways to end poverty.
Meanwhile, Scott Leckman would say, you have to keep busy. So last fall he talked to the Salt Lake Rotary Club about sponsoring a microcredit fund in the Phillipines. ("I'm a member of the club, and I tortured them about the idea," is how he describes his lobbying style.)
Recently he learned from Filipino Rotarians that 40 women have taken out small loans. Many have started stores in their homes. Several are buying and reselling fish and vegetables. "One woman is raising poultry and another is raising pigs, and the weekly repayment rates thus far have been 100 percent."
And here's what Leckman did last week. He went to Washington, D.C., taking his 11-year-old son because you are never too young to participate in democracy. He talked to his senator, Bob Bennett, with whom he'd been talking for a while now.
He watched while Bennett, who is on the foreign relations subcomittee, presented language for the foreign assistance bill asking that $135 million of foreign aid be earmarked for microcredit, with half that money being set aside for loans of less than $300.
He and the six other Utahns also did a little lobbying for seed money for domestic programs, he says.
Then Leckman came home, back to his surgical practice. It's good to be a doctor, he says. But when he is helping individuals, he's only helping individuals.
What he's learned from trying to save children's lives and from trying to end poverty is that working on the world's problems isn't really any harder than working on one person's problems.
He says, "More than one billion of our fellow human beings are trying to get by on $1 or less a day. One out of three children don't realize their intellectual potential because of malnutrition."
Don't be put off by the big numbers. Just know that all this suffering is unnecessary, he says. "If we can put a little robot thing on Mars and send pictures back, we can extend microcredit to every poor family in the world."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
How microcredit began in Bangladesh
(Muhammad) Yunus became intrigued when he saw many of the women in the poorest families making mora (finely woven bamboo stools). Because they lacked money, the women were forced to deal with paikars (middlemen) who sold them raw materials on credit and bought the stools for a pittance. The women's effective daily wage was 8 anna, or 2 cents. Yunus sent several of his students to find out how many people in the village were working under this type of arrangement. It turned out that there were 42 people who worked for roughly two pennies a day because they collectively lacked capital amounting to 856 taka ($21). Some needed only 10 or 20 taka and the greatest amount any one person needed was 65 taka.
Yunus was flabbergasted. Years later he would say that as he tried to reconcile himself with this information, he "felt ashamed to be part of a society which could not make $21 available to 42 hardworking, skilled human beings so that they could make a decent living." This lack of investment capital, he came to believe, was one of the root causes of poverty that blighted the villages.
- From "Give Us Credit," by Alex Counts
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Childhood deaths from major childhood diseases (under 5 years of age)
Year Millions of deaths
1983 12.1
1985 10.0
1990 9.6
1992 8.4