Grameen Bank

(noun)

The Grameen Bank, a microfinance organization and community development bank started in Bangladesh, makes small loans (known as microcredit or "grameencredit) to the impoverished without requiring collateral.

Related Terms

Examples of Grameen Bank in the following topics:

  • Microfinancing

    • The Grameen Bank is an example of a microfinance institution.
    • Operating primarily in Bangladesh, Grameen Bank extends loans to groups of people looking to start a local service or manufacturing company.
    • Relationship-based banking deals with individual entrepreneurs and individual businesses.
    • At this time, organizations such as the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, led by Muhammad Yunus, were beginning to shape the modern microfinance industry.
    • This is a photograph of a community-based savings bank in Cambodia.

  • Capitalism in a Global Economy

    • The main players are global institutions, such as International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the Bank for International Settlements; national agencies and government departments (e.g., central banks and finance ministries); private institutions acting on the global scale (e.g., banks, hedge funds), and regional institutions such as the Eurozone.

  • Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender

    • The wealthy had cars to leave New Orleans, and credit cards and bank accounts for emergency hotels and supplies.

  • Wealth

    • When a person decides to buy a house, they take out a mortgage from the bank at an interest rate that may or may not be fixed to stay the same over time.
    • When they can no longer pay back the loan at the agreed upon interest rate, their home is foreclosed and the bank that gave them the mortgage takes ownership of it.

  • Measuring Poverty

    • According to the World Bank, definitions of poverty include low income and the inability to acquire the basic goods and services necessary for survival with dignity.
    • The World Bank uses this definition of poverty to label extreme poverty as living on less than US $1.25 per day, and moderate poverty as less than $2 or $5 a day.

  • Role Theory

    • For instance, the behavior of someone who adopts the role of bank robber can be predicted - she will rob banks.
    • But if a bank teller simply begins handing out cash to random people, role theory would be unable to explain why (though role conflict could be one possible answer; the secretary may also be a Marxist-Communist who believes the means of production should belong to the masses and not the bourgeoisie).

  • Hunger, Malnutrition, and Family

    • These advocates argue that free trade policies transfer economic decision-making power into the hands of multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and transnational corporations, so that local people are unable to determine what is done with food that is locally produced.
    • At the other end of the spectrum, transnational organizations like the World Bank claim to be part of the solution to hunger, maintaining that the best way for countries to succeed in breaking the cycle of poverty and hunger is to build export-led economies that will give them the financial means to buy foodstuffs on the world market.

  • Industrializing Countries

    • According to research from the World Bank, one challenge facing industrializing nations is how to successfully export products when they do not have pre-existing infrastructures to facilitiate international trade.

  • Work and Technology

    • Automated teller machines have reduced the need for bank visits to obtain cash and carry out transactions.

  • New State Spaces

    • They may be national capitals, or they may host the headquarters of international organizations such as the World Bank, NATO, or the UN.