The Synopsis

“Small Change, World of Difference” is a feature length documentary about micro finance in developing nations and the way this innovative form of grassroots economic development is transforming entire national economies, one poor woman at a time. The film begins with Mahbub Sewaz—an eager young bank manager for the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh—as he travels to a lush but impoverished rural village where he establishes a new bank branch against the wishes of the local loan sharks, religious leaders and village elders. The film will then track three women at different stages of entrepreneurial development. Rohima, a poor and semi-starved, abandoned wife, gets her very first loan from Mahbub’s bank branch in order to purchase a used sewing machine. Firoza, a woman who has been borrowing from a different branch for five years has recently started earning enough from her chickens to cross the poverty line and is thinking about expanding her business. Aroti has been borrowing for more than eighteen years. Her water business has been so successful that she has recently run for and won a local election. Extensive interviews with Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winning founder of Grameen Bank, will provide the theoretical and historical context for our unfolding stories.

The Treatment

Cars, trucks, bicycle rickshaws and pedestrians make their way amidst the high rise office buildings, apartment blocks, shopping malls and city parks of Bangladesh’s capital city, Dhaka. Grameen Bank’s modern office building rises serenely above this frenetic city energy. Inside, a seasoned bank manager named Mahbub meets with his zonal manager who briefs him on his next assignment. He points to a central village near the Padma river on a large wall-map of Bangladesh. “This is one of the areas where we haven’t established many branches,” he explains. “You could be spending up to two years there and it will be difficult. I hope you’re prepared for this assignment,” he cautions Mahbub. Mahbub says he’s ready.

The bank manager’s story pauses here as we meet Muhammad Yunus for the first time. He sits in his office at the Grameen Bank, surrounded by emblems of his life’s work, gifts from his borrowers, photographs of him with his colleagues, his clients and with world leaders, his Nobel Peace prize and his diplomas. Yunus is the founder of Grameen bank and the innovator of micro lending on a large scale. His smiling face is full of compassion and hope while his voice reflects his passionate commitment to the work of ending economic suffering. Yunus will tell the story of how and why he established the first suite of micro-loans to the poorest women in a rural community, which will parallel and expand upon Mahbub’s story as it unfolds. “I made my first micro-loans,” he explains, “to a group of forty-two women in the village near the university in which I was teaching as the head of the economics department.”

Yunus continues to tell the story of his early experiments in micro lending as we watch Mahbub travel a full day to reach his village, by bus, then by ferry across the river and finally on the back of a bicycle rickshaw past lush agricultural land. Though primarily rural, Bangladesh is one of the most populous countries on earth and every acre is utilized for housing, growing food or raising livestock.
“Here I was, teaching grand theories of economics,” Yunus explains, “While all around me, poor people were dieing of starvation and living in abject poverty. I decided to put my books and my theories aside and head out to the countryside and learn directly from the people, taking my students with me.” Carrying his one bag, his button-down shirt and trousers wet with sweat, Mahbub walks down the dirt road that constitutes the small commercial section of Faridpur Village. He finds a lodging house and rents a room. The owner asks how long he plans on staying. “For a while,” Mahbub says. He finds his room and lies down on the ancient bed, utterly exhausted.

Yunus explains: “Our bank managers embrace Grameen as a great opportunity. They love the thrill of the experiment and the adventure of opening a new branch. And they are very well trained. Not in a classroom, however. They spend six months at an existing branch immersed in the culture of the poor, learning to appreciate the untapped potential of the destitute. Through experience, our bank workers become an elite brigade of poverty fighters.”

Yunus explains: “The manager arrives without any formal introduction. He has no office, no place to stay, and no one to get in touch with. We do this so they will bear as little resemblance as possible to the usual government officials who arrive with great pomp and expect luxuries. Grameen creates a new breed of official with fresh ideas and modest ways. Their first assignment is to document the economic situation of the area.”

Mahbub walks from his lodging to the center of the village, introduces himself to the village elders and explains his purpose. The elders display obvious unease and clearly dissemble at his questions about the standard of living, the local economy and who are the poorest citizens of their village. Mahbub realizes he won’t get the information he requires, so he thanks them and leaves to find a tea stall. The boy who serves Mahbub asks him where he’s from, impressed by his shirt and trousers, unusual garb for a rural village.

The next day Mahbub visits the local school. He knows from experience that even the poorest women will heed a teacher. As children dressed in blue uniforms run from the building past Mahbub, he introduces himself to Salim, the school’s sole teacher. Mahbub asks questions about the local economy and the status of women. Salim is reticent at first, but once he learns that Mahbub is from the Grameen Bank, he happily explains that women work the fields during harvest time. During the rest of the year, the local women build stools and other home furnishings like reed sleeping mats, while others just beg for a living. Mahbub invites Salim to join him at a local tea stall. Over sips of tea and much laughter, Mahbub offers to hire Salim during the afternoons, after the completion of his daily school duties, to help recruit women borrowers for the village’s new bank branch.

What follows is a montage of Mahbub and Salim, over the course of two weeks traveling throughout the region on foot meeting poor, working women. Yunus explains: “Early on in my research, I realized that international development programs focus on farmers and landowners, ignoring the members of society most in need. This is because they take a bird’s eye view of a country’s economic conditions. I take what I like to call, a worm’s eye view,” Yunus says, laughing wisely. On screen, we see Mahbub and Salim speaking with women outside their run-down, thatched-roof houses, weaving sleeping mats and doing other crafts, their children playing in the dirt, unsupervised. Yunus continues: “The truly poor, the poorest of the poor, were women, many widowed, divorced or abandoned with children to feed who were landless and assetless without any hope.”

Mahbub and Salim approach a woman who is building a bamboo stool, her fingers black with caked dirt, her hands working fast and efficiently. She is so intent on her labor that she doesn’t notice the strangers until Salim speaks, at which point she jumps up and runs into her house. Salim tells her through her bamboo walls, “You know me, I’m a teacher in the village. We’re just here to ask you some questions.”

Mahbub picks up one of the children playing nearby while neighbors peer from their windows at the strangers. “You’re children are lovely,” Mahbub says.
The woman comes to her doorway and peers out. “Would you mind if we asked you some questions,” Salim asks. The women nods and they begin a conversation in which the woman reveals that she is a single mother who borrows money from a local moneylender to buy the bamboo for her stools. He then buys the completed stools from her for well below market value, earning the woman just a few cents on each stool. As they continue to converse, Yunus provides more background information: “In my university courses, I theorized about sums in the millions of dollars, but in the nearby village, problems of life and death were posed in terms of pennies. These women were in a form of bonded labor, slavery even. I realized that their situation would only change if they could get enough credit to buy their own raw materials and sell their goods in a free market, charging the full retail price to the consumer. But there was no formal financial institution to cater to these women. When I tried to get the local banks to extend such credit to them, they balked at the tiny sums involved, the lack of collateral and the onerous paperwork that most of these women wouldn’t even be able to read. These women were the banking untouchables.”

Mahbub explains to the woman how a low interest micro-loan can pull her out of poverty. “We will provide you the money to buy the bamboo and you only have to pay it back one taka a day while you sell your stools in the village for its full value. Almost all your profit will go to you so you can purchase more bamboo and begin to get out of poverty.”

The woman seems to understand and asks some questions. Mahbub promises to visit her in a few days to answer any additional questions she might have. The montage continues. Between long walks in the excruciating heat and the occasional downpour, we hear more snippets of conversations with other women villagers. Some women want nothing to do with Mahbub. “Women shouldn’t handle money,” one of them tells Salim, “that’s a man’s job.”

Others, desperate, hungry and barely able to survive, are intrigued by his offer and agree to come to a meeting. One woman has lost her husband to tuberculosis and ekes out a living husking rice. The little money another woman manages to earn is taken by her husband. Mahbub is throwing these women a lifeline. They have heard how Grameen bank has helped women in other communities and some are willing to give it a try.

But there’s a catch. Every woman who is interested, Mahbab explains, must find four other women from outside their families to come with them to the first meeting. “You can only borrow in groups of five. You must help each other,” he repeats what he’s been emphasizing over and over for days, “It will only work if you help each other.”

It is during this sequence in which Mahbub systematically gathers information and recruits borrowers that we meet our first borrower, Rohima. Rohima has a round, open face with bright brown eyes and wears a sari in multiple hues of blue. She makes a living cooking for her brother’s family and only eats whatever’s left over. She lives in a hut barely suitable for human habitation and is mostly reviled by her community because of her divorce. She tells Mahbub with some enthusiasm that with her loan, “I could buy a cow, or some chickens, or maybe a sewing machine.”

Over the course of the next week, as Rohima makes her way around her neighborhood, she stops to chat with other poor women and tells them about the bank and the loans they can get to start their own businesses. Some laugh at the thought, while others are interested. During these casual interactions at the edge of the rice fields or under a jackfruit tree, we learn more details about the lives of Bangladeshi women. One woman complains that she can’t marry off her daughter because her husband drank away her dowry. “Will they lend me money for that?” she asks. Rohima doubts it. Another woman’s imagination is sparked by the idea of a loan. “I could lease some land and grow carrots,” she says wistfully.

Three weeks after Mahbub arrived in the village, he has organized enough women to hold their first training sessions. On a Sunday afternoon as the sun is setting, twenty-five women dressed in their colorful saris gather in Rohima’s dusty, walled courtyard. Mahbub explains to the women that the very first step is to start saving money­. The women laugh nervously at such an outrageous suggestion. Mahbub continues: “As impossible as that sounds, each of you will have to set up a savings account with the bank, even if you can only deposit 10 Taka.” Within each group of five, he goes on to explain, the poorest two group members get their loan the first week, the second two borrowers get their loans the following week, and then finally the fifth member gets her loan a week after that. Sometimes, however, all five members will receive their loans at once. “For this to work,” Mahbub explains, “you all have to succeed.” Emphasizing the fundamental creed behind Grameen’s success, he continues: “I believe each and every one of you has something you do well and the ability to support yourself doing that thing. You’ve just never had the chance to prove it. A loan, along with the support of your group, will make that possible.” Some of the women seem to understand this and their faces brighten. A few women are holding hands. Rohima looks around at the other women apprehensively.

The final task of their first meeting is not so simple: the women must learn to sign their names. Eighty-five percent of women in rural Bangladesh are illiterate, so Mahbub and Salim set about teaching the others how to hold a stick and draw the shapes that constitute the letters of their names into the dusty earth of the courtyard. Suddenly, the atmosphere changes into one of a classroom of six–year–old girls. Giggling, giddy, nervous, silent or excited, they take their sticks in hand and begin.

After the meeting, Mahbub and Salim return to their favorite tea stall to celebrate their initial success. “It looks like I’m going to be staying for a while,” Mahbub says. “Can you recommend someone from whom I can rent a room to set up an office?” Salim knows just the place and on Monday Mahbub rents a second floor room above the village’s largest grocery stall and spreads out his paperwork on an improvised desk made from food crates and an old door. He studies his materials for the weeklong training session and scribbles notes by candlelight.

While the women arrive in Mahbub’s office for their first of a week of classes, the village elders gather at a tea stall. Having heard about the new bank office and the classes, they discuss the developments with some agitation. “Allah will punish these women for borrowing money from this devil,” one of them shouts. “Their husbands should beat them and keep them away from the banker,” another one adds.

But the classes go on. In addition to writing their names, the women learn the rules involved in borrowing and paying back their loans. They learn Grameen Bank’s Sixteen Decisions and memorize them. They learn the special Grameen salute, which teaches the women to hold their heads high and look other people in the eye. On the seventh day of training, they must pass an oral test. If they fail, they must take it again before anyone on their group can begin to borrow.

Mahbub asks Rohima to recite Decision number eleven and to explain it. She struggles her way through the Decision, weeping, but cannot explain it. Her friend Sati pats her hand and reassures her: “You will pass next time. We will help you.” Another woman passes her test on the same Decision: “Number eleven: We shall not take any dowry at our sons’ weddings; neither shall we give any dowry at our daughter’s wedding. We shall keep our village free from the curse of dowry. We shall not practice child marriage.” Mahbub asks her to explain this Decision. “Because the dowry makes it harder for us to support our families,” she says and smiles shyly.

Yunus explains: “Unlike other commercial bankers, our bank managers consider themselves teachers in the sense that they help their borrowers to explore their full potential, to extend their capabilities further than ever before. Traditional bank officials need their office, their papers, their telephones and desks for support and feel lost without these props. But you can strip everything away from a Grameen employee and still at heart he or she remains a teacher.”

The next day, Rohima returns to retake her oral exam, but a member of her group arrives to tell her that one of their group of five has dropped out because her family convinced her that if she borrowed money from Grameen, she would be taken to the Middle East and sold to a slave trader. When she told them she didn’t believe them, they beat her severely. Before retaking the test, Rohima and her group will have to go out into the village and find a replacement. Yunus explains: “Grameen never manages the groups of five, but we create incentives to encourage the borrowers to help one another succeed. Not only does this provide support and protection, but it also smoothes out the erratic behavior of individual members. It has the added benefit of reducing the work of the bank while increasing self-reliance.”

Rohima and her group go back to work to find another woman to join their group, but still meet resistance from most of the villagers they approach. One woman complains that if she joins the bank, she will not be given a proper Islamic burial when she dies.
“Who told you that?” Rohima asks.
“The Mullah,” she responds before scurrying away.
They finally recruit a new group member and the night before her retest, Rohima visits a local shrine at dusk, lights a precious candle and prays to Allah to help her pass her test. As we watch her travel the following morning to the bank office to take her test, Yunus explains: “The pressure of the group and the exam helps ensure that only those who are truly needy and serious about joining Grameen will actually become members. This is our way of weeding out the women who in the long run wouldn’t succeed. We want only courageous, ambitious pioneers in our micro-credit program. Those are the ones who will succeed.”

It is the first day the bank is dispersing loans to its new crop of women borrowers. The husband of one of the women in Rohima’s group who put up a fight has finally come around. “I should get the loan,” he insisted, not a woman, not my wife.” But the woman held steadfast and she and her husband finally agreed to use their loan of seven thousand taka ($100) to buy a cow and sell the milk. Rohima’s group arrives at the village center and waits for the meeting to get started. Suddenly Rohima gets apprehensive. “It’s too much money,” she cries. “No one in my family has ever had that much money. How will I ever be able to repay it?” Her group reminds her that she will only have to pay a few taka a week and that they will help her if anything goes wrong. Mahbub invites them inside and greets them with a huge smile, excited to be extending Grameen’s first micro-loan in the village. He enters the amounts in his ledger and then hands the bills to Rohima whose hands are trembling. Finally, she takes the money and holds it like a delicate bird. She thanks Mahbub, “I will honor this loan and my group,” she says with near reverence. “I will pay back every penny.”
“I know you will,” says Mahbub.

Rohima’s plan is to buy a used sewing machine to make and repair garments. Yunus explains, “All her life she has been told that she is no good, that she brings only misery to her family, and that they cannot afford to pay her dowry. Many times she hears her mother or her father tell her she should have been killed at birth, aborted or starved. To her family, she has been nothing but another mouth to feed, another dowry to pay. But today, for the first time in her life, an institution has trusted her with a great sum of money. It transforms her.”

Rohima buys a used sewing machine and some fabric with her money and sells her first garment almost immediately. With the income, Rohima begins to pay off her loan. She arrives at the bank office with a huge smile and cannot wait to hand Mahbub her first repayment and tell him the good news. Yunus explains: “Unlike most bank loans, our loans are non-compounded interest loans, at 20%. If one of our clients borrows $100, they have one year to pay back $120 in fifty installments. That means they only have to pay two dollars and forty cents each week, which is quite manageable.”

One month into her loan, however, Rohima’s sewing machine breaks. She arrives at the weekly bank meeting crying because she doesn’t have the money to pay her weekly loan installment. “I knew this would end terribly,” she says to Mahbub through her tears.
Mahbub smiles. “Remember,” he tells her, “you have been saving. We will pay this week’s installment from your savings account.” The group also arranges for a local mechanic to come and look at her machine and he repairs it easily.

Despite continuing opposition from the town’s Mullah and other leaders, more women from the village and surrounding areas assemble in groups of five, take the weeklong training and borrow money for small enterprises. Some of these women are the homeless, half-starved villagers who initially refused to talk to Mahbub or to come to a bank meeting. Yunus explains, “Our staff go quietly about their business in one tiny corner of the village. If just a handful of desperate women make a leap of faith and join Grameen, everything changes. They get their money, start earning additional income and nothing terrible happens. People come to accept us and opposition dies off. But in every new village, it is always a battle to begin.”

Rohima turns out to be an intrepid group leader. She represents her group of five at the weekly meetings where everyone pays their installments and new loans are discussed. She takes the lead when it’s time for all the groups to borrow 1,800 taka together in order to build a permanent community hut for the weekly meetings. The extended sequences that document these projects and events will introduce audiences to the obstacles poor women must overcome both in their communities and in their own self-worth in order to take on the leadership necessary to transform oppressive and entrenched cultural and economic traditions. When one of the borrowers refuses to give her husband the money, he beats her and she is forced to leave him, taking her two small children with her.

Muhammad Yunus explains how and why women became the target of Grameen’s micro loan strategy: “It took more than six years to achieve our goal of having half our borrowers be women. There were gigantic obstacles in the way. Conventional banks won’t loan money to any woman without asking them to bring their husbands in to discuss it. But the more money we lent to women, the more we realized that credit given to a woman brings about change faster than when given to a man. If the goal of economic development is improving the standard of living, reducing poverty, creating dignified employment opportunities, and reducing inequality, then it is natural to work through women. Not only do women constitute the majority of the poor, the underemployed and the economically and socially disadvantaged, but also they more readily and successfully improve the welfare of both children and men. Now, ninety-six percent of our borrowers are women.”

Rohima partners with another woman from her group to keep the sewing machine running for two shifts. As a seamstress, the clothes she makes have brought in enough income to pay off her loan and she is earning her way out of poverty. In a rare intimate conversation, Rohima reveals the reason she wept while reading the Eleventh Decision one year ago. She was married at the age of twelve and was beaten by her husband who was twenty years her senior. After ten years of this, she finally found the strength to leave. But that only left her more isolated, as she was shunned for violating her husband’s pride. Finally, her isolation has ended thanks to the bank and her group.

The women from the bank’s first year of micro lending celebrate their second round of loans with a festive gathering that includes a generous pot luck of colorful, regional foods and games for their children to play with in the courtyard. Some of the women who are married have even brought their husbands, who have joined their wives not only for the food, but also because they have come to accept and even feel grateful for the improvements the bank has brought about in their families. Yunus explains the staying power of this work: “The women who are the most desperate, who have nothing to eat, who have been abandoned by their husbands and are trying to feed their children by begging, usually stand by their decision to join Grameen Bank no matter who threatens them. They have no other choice. In some cases, they must either borrow from us or watch their children die.” Over the course of the last year, we have watched many of these women begin to thrive, engaged in a wide variety of micro enterprises from husking rice, trading in brass, processing mustard oil and cultivating jackfruit. Mahbub extends the reach of his branch to the surrounding villages and brings in a few staff bankers from the central bank in Dhaka to manage the growing number of loans and borrowers.

At this point, we leave Rohima’s story and travel to another village that has a well–established branch of the Grameen bank. Here, we meet Firoza who has been borrowing for five years. Her first loan of $30 paid for fifty chickens and she began to sell the eggs. Now, five years later, she borrows $400 per year and has over 1,000 chickens. She sells 900 eggs every day to a single buyer. Her husband manages the poultry farm and services other nearby farms. Firoza proudly owns her land and earns about $16 a day.

During the year that we film Firoza’s story, she will take some bold steps. In order to increase her earnings, she has decided to work with Grameen Shakti, the Grameen energy company, to install a biogas energy plant. She will need to build a small collection reservoir and biogas tanks, and hire an employee, her first, to collect the chicken manure for processing. Her chicken manure will create enough fuel for all her cooking needs, as well as that of several neighboring homes and tea stalls. If all goes smoothly, the system will pay for itself in less than three years.

Throughout her years with Grameen, the bank officers have discouraged Firoza and the other members of her group from having children while still below the poverty level and have taught them about the terrible consequences of overpopulation in Bangladesh. However, now that Firoza has more money and some stability, she and her husband have decided to give birth to a child. In addition to her loan for the biogas plant, she will also take out a loan to build a new house for her growing family.

There are entrepreneurial advantages to a larger home as well. Firoza will now have a place to store twenty–kilo bags of lentils, rice and other dry goods that she can sell when prices rise. With a new, watertight roof, she won’t have to worry about the moisture and mold that plagued her older, leaky–roofed home during monsoon season. It is this kind of entrepreneurial inventiveness (the creation of multiple streams of income) that distinguishes many Grameen borrowers.

Meanwhile, other members of Firoza’s group are diversifying as well. One woman buys a cellular phone from Grameen Telecom, another division of Grameen bank, which she rents out to the villagers to make calls to relatives and friends in order to conduct business and arrange marriages. Another woman builds a small addition to her house and rents it out to temporary lodgers, who are working at a nearby factory.

Firoza’s story concludes with the completion of her biogas installation. She strikes a match, places it at the grill of her stovetop and it lights up for the first time, running exclusively on methane made from the manure of her chickens. She breaks into laughter that becomes infectious, her husband and group members joining in. Then she suddenly gets serious and grabs the teakettle to boil water for her guests. “We mustn’t waste this precious gas,” she whispers to her husband, then takes her newborn from one of her group members and cradles it in her arms, cooing and smiling proudly.

From Firoza’s village, we travel to Solanga, a village in the West where we meet Aroti Rani, a woman who’s been borrowing from Grameen for more than eighteen years. Aroti lived in an impoverished home with her husband and was a housewife and a mother of two young boys. Unlike most Bangladeshi women who are Muslim, Aroti is Hindu. Her first loan was for $25, which she used to buy a cow. She had some success selling the milk, but after a few years, she invested her loan into motorized water pumps. Since her husband was already a trained mechanic, this made more sense since he could fix the pumps when they failed. Now, more than a decade into the water business, she owns three pumps and sells the water for irrigation to more than sixty small farms.

While growing her business, she raised her two boys, who are now both university students. With the help of larger and larger loans every year from the Grameen bank, Aroti and her family were able to build a beautiful new house and are now firmly in the middle class. Last year, Aroti became fed up with the local political establishment and decided to run for a position on the Union Council, the equivalent of a city council in the United States. Utilizing her extensive network of friends and colleagues in the micro finance community, she was able to rally enough support and votes to win the election.

During the year that we follow Aroti’s life, we will watch as she works within the political establishment to advocate for poor women and families against an entrenched and corrupt system of cronyism. Her activism will also extend to other innovative social structures nurtured and supported by the Grameen Corporation.
One of the women on Aroti’s center is Shoptomi, a borrower of fifteen years. She uses her loans to buy supplies for her family-owned and run ceramics plant that has been passed down for generations. She is able to support her family of seven children and her eldest son is now a Grameen Bank officer at the village branch.

Another center member is Salina who teaches at a preschool, part of an extensive network of early childhood education centers established by Grameen Shikka. Grameen Shikka operates in seventy-eight villages and encourages holistic physical, social and emotional development as well as providing parents with information on health, nutrition and human development.

A third member is Runu who owns and runs a papier-mâché factory with her husband in a corrugated metal building where fifteen employees cut and glue a wide variety of colorful party decorations, dolls and other festive items. Recently, Runu’s husband has fallen ill with a stroke and she is concerned that the medical expenses will exhaust the emergency fund she’s been accumulating for two decades. Fortunately, there is a Grameen Kaylon healthcare center in a nearby village that is helping Runu’s husband in his recovery. Because Grameen policy emphasizes saving money as well as entrepreneurship, borrowers like Runu are almost always able to weather the inevitable setbacks caused by business failures, natural disasters and disease.

Aroti and her group members exemplify the positive long­–term impact of Grameen Bank’s economic, social and cultural institutions. Because of Grameen Shakti (energy), Shikka (education), Telecom (cell phone network) and Kaylon (healthcare), women are battling sexism to become contributing leaders in their communities: as parents to better educated children; as entrepreneurs and heads of household able to support their families; and as community leaders teaching school, running for political office and modeling the healthier way of life enumerated by the Sixteen Decisions.

The film concludes with Muhammad Yunus sharing his vision for the future: “By the year 2015, the United Nations’ goal, set during the 2000 Millennium Summit, of cutting world poverty in half will actually happen. The Summit goal is the same as our goal and our tool is micro credit. But my goal—a goal that was not established at the Summit—is to end poverty completely by 2030. And then we’ll create poverty museums where children can go and see what poverty used to be like.”

Many films and TV segments have been produced about the powerful impact of Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank. But only “Small Change, World of Difference” depicts the real-life courage and commitment that bankers and borrowers must manifest for micro lending to succeed. It is the only film that takes viewers through the entire process of setting up a trust-based, micro credit bank, from the time the very first seed is planted in the minds of poor, third-world women through the blossoming of their entrepreneurial spirit and their power.