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Women’s alliance holds workshop on microcredit

“Financial empowerment can be the key for women to play a greater role in bringing about positive changes.”

— Mujibul Alam Khan, activist

In the midst of a serious “credit card slave” problem in Taiwan, the National Alliance of Taiwan Women’s Associations (NATWA) held a workshop yesterday based on the microcredit system developed in Bangladesh to examine Taiwan’s financial policies and inspire Taiwan’s underprivileged women.

“The Grameen Bank [of Bangladesh] has proven that financial empowerment can be the key for women to play a greater role in bringing about positive changes in society,” said Mujibul Alam Khan, a Bengali living in Taiwan and an activist in social movements and non-government organizations.

Microcredit, created by the economist Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1976, is an approach to combating poverty by lending small amounts of money, usually within US$200, to people considered “unbankable,” such as the unemployed and poor people, said Tseng Yu-hwei (曾育慧), who has translated Yunus’ book Banker to the Poor.

Of Grameen Bank’s debtors, 93 percent are women, Tseng said, adding that the repayment rate was as high as 98.5 percent in 2006.

Compared to Yunus’ contributions to alleviating poverty, Taiwan’s financial businesses only focus on profits and have created “credit card slaves” who are unable to pay off their credit card debt, leading to unrecoverable loans and creating a negative impact on Taiwan’s economic growth, NATWA said in a statement.

Ministry of Justice statistics show that about 510,000 people in Taiwan are “credit card slaves.”

The World Vision charity organization has operated the microcredit system in 47 countries, serving 560,000 clients and helping to improve the lives of 1.7 million poor children, said Alice Chang of World Vision’s public relations department.

“But in Taiwan, the system is still limited to discussion without concrete measures, because of restrictions created by the country’s financial regulations,” Tseng said.

Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his contributions to improving poor people’s living conditions through microcredit, which teaches economic independence.
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