Maiiina

Grameen Foundation Australia
Type	non-profit organization
Location	Sydney;
Origins	Grameen Bank
Method	microfinance
Website	website

Grameen Foundation Australia (GFA) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Sydney (Australia) create to support the poverty alleviation work and mission of the Grameen Bank, Grameen Trust and their affiliate organisations by giving access to the poorest people to microfinance and as a result of access to these services, move themselves out of poverty.
"The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world … all we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them." -Muhammad Yunus

History

Grameen Foundation Australia (“GFA”) takes its inspiration from the poverty alleviation work done by Professor Muhammad Yunus and his colleagues at Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

In 2006, Prof. Yunus and Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel peace prize for “their efforts to create economic and social development from below”. According to the Norwegian Nobel Committee “…Every single individual on earth has both the potential and the right to live a decent life. Across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development”.

GFA’s predecessor in Australia, the Grameen Bank Support Group, was started by 10 co-founders (including the current CEO of GFA, Shan Ali) in Sydney in 1994. The purpose of this group was to promote the work and vision of Grameen Bank amongst the Australian public, media and policy makers.

Between 1994 and 1998 the Support Group engaged with the Grameen Bank in a number of ways. The most fruitful instances of this engagement were:

In 1994 there were no public or commercial Internet gateways in Bangladesh. An Internet user in Dhaka wanting to send and retrieve their emails had to dial-in over ISD lines into computers overseas. The Support Group was able to persuade a Canadian organisation (called International Development Research Centre) to implement an Internet gateway at the Grameen Bank, the first in Bangladesh. Maria Ng (of IDRC), Rob Hurle (of ANU) and Shan Ali went to Dhaka and worked together to implement this project.
In 1997 the Group wrote a submission on the Grameen Housing Program in Bangladesh for the UN World Habitat Award. This required on-the-ground research in Bangladesh, as well as accompanying United Nations assessors on a field visit to Bangladesh. The submission resulted in Grameen Bank winning the 1998 World Habitat Award.
In 1998, as a founding board member of the Sydney Peace Foundation, Shan Ali successfully recommended Prof. Yunus for the inaugural Sydney Peace Prize. Since then the Sydney Peace Prize has been awarded to a number of other eminent peace-makers such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mary Robinson and Irene Khan.

During Prof. Yunus’ visit to Sydney in 1998 to receive the Sydney Peace Prize, he met with members of the Grameen Bank Support Group and their pro-bono lawyer David Ford, and gave detailed guidance on setting up GFA. Whilst there are no formal protocols in place for a country to establish a Grameen Foundation, this personal imprimatur from Prof. Yunus became the mandate underpinning the existence of GFA. In 1999 the Grameen Bank Support Group was disbanded in Australia and replaced by the newly incorporated GFA.

In the first 5 years of GFA’s existence GFA carried out AusAID projects in East Timor, Nepal, Vietnam, the Philippines and Bangladesh. In the last few years GFA has been heavily involved in poverty alleviation in the Philippines (see below).

In 1994, a similar foundation, Grameen Foundation USA (“GFUSA”) was started in the United States by Alex Counts (www.grameenfoundation.org).

N.B: It is important to recognize that there are no formal relationships between the various members of the “Grameen Family”, namely Grameen Bank and Grameen Trust in Bangladesh, GFA in Australia and GFUSA in the United States.   However, there is a strong informal association between these organizations.  They draw upon each others expertise when required and they are all inspired by Prof. Yunus’ philosophy of alleviating poverty through driving scalable efficiencies in service delivery to the poor and supporting the skills and entrepreneurship of the poor.

Mission

The mission of GFA is to see poor people, especially the poorest and those living in harder to reach areas, to extract themselves from poverty trough micro finance, and lead lives of respect, dignity and opportunity for the long-term. GFA works for empowerment of targeted populations, not dependence (non paternalist organization).

Projects

Rather than provide funds and technical assistance to local and regional microfinance organizations directly administering microfinance programs, GFA directly administers microfinance programs. The Current GFA Projects are : 1. Poverty alleviation in Northern Samar, the Philippines (see separate presentation) 2. Poverty alleviation in the Manila Slums (trial project) (see separate presentation) 3. Scoping work (early stages) in the State of Andhra Pradesh in India 4. Scoping work (early stages) in East Timor

Core Principles

Every action made by GFA follows the core principles that the foundation impose to herself and which are:  A holistic approach to assisting development in a targeted region (i.e. not just micro-finance)  Effective use of partnerships (e.g. Rotary clubs, Farm Africa, local governments) which can bring particular skills, resources and local knowledge to help maximise project outcomes  Hard work, efficiency, innovation, cost-effectiveness  Honesty, transparency, accountability  Constant improvement in the way that we operate  Maximizing the organization's leverage at all times so that we can have the maximum substantive effect on helping poor people in poor developing countries.  Empowerment of targeted populations, not welfare and dependence  Remain secular and respectful to others’ values and beliefs.