Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Short, Small and Unsecured takes a small area of western India and looks closely at how the money goes round. It delves deliciously deeply into things like how the pawnbroking business works, and exactly how poor farmers get together to set up savings and loans clubs. The book was written in 1989 but the same lessons still apply.
Tell us about your last book, Small, Short and Unsecured.
If any single book inspired my own writing it is this one. When I got back to London from my Managua work in 1974, I searched the libraries, with little success, for books on how poor people in developing countries manage their money. Then somebody told me about F J A (Fritz) Bouman. Of his several books, I like Short, Small and Unsecured best. It takes a small area of western India and looks closely at how the money goes round. It delves deliciously deeply into things like how the pawnbroking business works, and exactly how poor farmers get together to set up savings and loans clubs. The book was written in 1989 but the same lessons still apply: poor people’s need for financial tools is even more intense than that of richer people, since, by virtue of their small and unreliable incomes, they are more often driven to find ways of using past income (through savings) or future income (through loans) to finance current expenditure, whether it is on food and shelter, or health and welfare, or assets or businesses, or whatever.
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Stuart Rutherford, author of The Poor and their Money, is interested in the way in which poor people manage their money. He has spent the last 30 years travelling the world, researching the different financial strategies of the less well-off in a variety of different cultures. This has led him to an interest in microfinance, the practice of issuing small loans in poor communities, with the aim of empowering individuals to invest as they choose. In the 1990s he set up SafeSave, his own microfinance co-operative in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and later in Hrishipara, a rural area. SafeSave is an alternative to the popular microfinance schemes, based on saving rather than loans (you can find out about SafeSave on his website).
