1

Dowla, Asif, and Dipal Barua. The Poor Always Pay Back: The Grameen II Story. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian, 2006. Print. Cost: 7.99 (Amazon)

Rose Pendley and Christian ReyesBook Review

CMST 303-002April 26, 2015

2

The Poor Always Pay Back

The novel The Poor Always Pay Back by Asif Dowla and Dipal Barua goes into great

detail in examining the Grameen Bank, both the original concept and the remodeled version of

the bank known as Grameen ll. The book does an incredibly thorough job of exploring the past,

present, and future of the company, and the transitions between them. From the first member in

1983 to 5,660,454 members in 2006 the bank which is now both a publicly and privately traded

company has always aimed to shape their company in light of the member’s needs.

The Bank was started when the founder Mohammad Yunus met a bamboo stall maker

named Sufia Khatoon who was stuck in a viscous cycle of oweing and borrowing with a money

lender to support her family. Yunus, who had recently earned a PhD in economics and some of

his students found that there were 42 people in Sufia’s village alone who were stuck in the same

situation she was. Yunus gave those people their money out of his own pocket to escape the

grasps of the money lender. When these loans were repaid in full, he realized, “These people

were poor, not because they were lazy or stupid, but because they did not have credit and could

not get any from a formal financial institution because they had no collateral” (Dowla and Barua

16).

Dowla and Barua wrote this book to prove just that. They take readers through the

different life stages of the Grameen Bank, all to prove that the institution itself has lifted millions

of people out of poverty, proving all skeptics wrong. At the end of the day, the poor really do

always pay back. Unknowingly, Dowla and Barua also wrote this book to perfectly coincide with

3

the themes and terminology of Organizations Communication that are discussed in both our book

and class.

There are two major themes in this book, on being crisis, and closely related to that, the

other would be change. A great deal of the book discusses the floods in Bangladesh or the effects

of the flood. It was the worst flood in the history of the country and more than half its population

was affected in a devastating way from losing their home, crops, or maybe even lives. This flood

was the cause of all the change in the Grameen bank in 1998, when the entire bank was

restructuring from bottom to top. The bank couldn’t handle the crisis. Groups were eliminated,

loan types were changed, payment plans were personalized, essentially the essence of the bank

stayed the same, but the actual day to day operations changed for both members and employees

of the bank.

The concept of globalization is beyond relevant to the Grameen Bank, in 1983 the bank

opened its doors the first customer, and in 2010 the bank exceeded 10 million members. The

wide variety of members, locations, and needs are so diverse the bank must evolve and change

with the environment around it. Especially in such an ever changing society, the bank must

remain interconnected with the outside world to understand the changing needs of the borrowers,

as well as maintain connection and understanding internally between branches to maintain

successful as one whole.

At the center of the entire company is the members, it is here demographics come into

play. In order to become a member of the bank, applicants must meet certain poverty

requirements, Including but limited to, yearly income, land ownership, and family size. It is also

common, for the members at any specific branch to be predominantly women. At one time loans

4

were only given to the women of the house though now anyone can receive loan regardless of

gender.

The Four Flow of Communication is also highlighted in the book. Membership

negotiations come into play as previously mentioned, members must meet specific demographic

requirements to borrow from the bank. Member groups are very Self-Structured. Every group is

composed of 5 people including a group chairman and a group secretary, who maintain group

administration duties. The Center manager is in charge of all activity coordination, from

collecting money, to organizing member activities. Institutional positioning is very hierarchical,

in that control and power is incredibly linear, from the group members at the bottom, then center

and branch managers above them and nation employees above them etcetera.

Additionally, the concept of an organizational life cycle comes into play when the bank

went through a period of restructuring following a flood in Bangladesh of monumental

proportions. With 70% of branches affected, it became clear that the traditional version of

Grameen wasn’t able to withstand a crisis. Eventually after bringing in task forces and a period

of trial and error, a new structure of the bank would become finalized and called Grameen II.

As stated earlier, the original Grameen was unable to handle a big crisis like the flood in

1998 in Bangladesh. The organization crisis Grameen went through was dramatic because of the

realization that the bank had to change abruptly due to the flood. At this time, those who were

affected by the flood were not insured against floods because of the underdeveloped financial

market. In the midst of the destruction, people lost assets such as livestock, homes damaged and

170 members lost their lives. In response, Grameen tried to relieve the stress of their members by

allowing the members to use up to 90% of their savings group fund and also implemented

supplementary loan to use to repair homes. Unfortunately, the actions Grameen took at the time

5

did not measure out and were seen as a burden because borrowers are unable to pay off the

accumulated loans. In order to gain control of the organization, Grameen had to recruit

volunteers from the classical days to create a task force in hopes to implement and install the

foundation of the bank.

Furthermore, the task force created a feedback and exchange process to better re-establish

the organization from its original roots. By doing so, the task force was given responsibility to

run the worst-performing zones. The task force had to collaborate amongst each other to see the

best fit to improve the situations in the branch.  What the task force actually saw best fit was,

“rather than starting over and adopting a holistic approach to improve the overall of the branch,

the task forces concentrated on improving the repayment rate only.”  Management argued that if

the task force emphasized on just one aspect, than it would eventually led back to the crisis. You

can see that both the task force and management were highly involved in coming to a solution to

the problem which involved both parties to effectively communicate to each other. Evidently,

management allowed the task force to see fit to the problem by making suggestions and new

innovations for Grameen II and made priority meetings for the task force to meet. Their meetings

were highly organized which included well-defined agendas that discussed local branch issues.

During the task force period, there was uncertainty of change amongst each other. This

period was rough because some of the task force in different branches were slacking and not

following through with meetings or gathering with borrowers. This led to a crisis in 1999. Task

forces worked hard then to create methods that were successful for their branch in hopes of

others to adapt as well. Unfortunately, other branches refused their methods because they felt the

method would not be successful in their area of operation. The uncertainty of change grew

amongst different task force branches because of the lack of success.

6

Lastly, accommodations had to be made. In order to get all the branches on the same

page, the head office suggest starting “implementing changes at once center in a couple of

branches.” By doing so, they created a rulebook for some branches to use as references. These

rules were created by gathering feedback from borrowers, staff, and the task force.       In May,

2000 after the rules were finalized, the staff now had to convert to Grameen II. In this process,

the staff had to convert all the basic loans into flexible loans. The book goes into great detail in

what else went into making the transition. As a result of the change, Grameen II flourished and

was able to regain the respect of its members and even gain new members.      

Rose’s Recommendation: I would 100% recommend this book to other readers. To me it

was incredibly interesting reading about this bank that has had incredible effects on the lives of

millions of people, and it’s something that I had never heard of in my entire life. While doing

research on the book, I ran across a quote from in an article that said Muhammad Yunus (the

creator of the bank) is single handedly credited with lifting millions of people out of poverty. It is

fascinating to me that I’d never heard of this organization that has literally completely changed

the lives of millions of people. The book explains how Yunus has done this pretty much from

beginning to end, and it fascinating to read.

Christian’s recommendation: I would and would not recommend this book. The reason I

would recommend the book is because it gives the audience a perspective of how other people in

the world live. It illustrates the different struggles they have to go through every day and how

they overcome those struggles. It gives you an appreciation of what you have and also awareness

of what else is happening in our world. The reason I also won’t recommend it is that you can lose

interest or focus because the book provides detailed behind the scenes information. They go into

great detail on how the loans work and what they have to do in order to obtain the goal. That is

7

just my personal view on the book. Overall, it was a great book about an organization that started

from a vision into an organization that now impacts millions of lives.