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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

[ALOCHONA] Graduate students focus efforts to alleviate poverty in Bangladesh

Graduate students focus efforts to alleviate poverty in Bangladesh

Submitted by Lily Chen on 04-15-08, 10:57 pm | Updated on 04-15-08, 11:05 pm | More from this Writer | Submit to Digg or Facebook
They went on a mission to alleviate poverty.
Twenty-eight Vanderbilt graduate students and faculty traveled to Bangladesh over their spring break to help discover and create financial opportunities for local villages.
"We wanted to use for-profit business to alleviate poverty and not just provide charity funding," said Ryan Igleheart, a first-year student at Owen Graduate School of Management and an organizer of the trip. "We're trying to find working business models to help the life of the poor, to provide access to information, goods and services."
The group worked with Project Pyramid to engage in a variety of activities including interviewing borrowers of micro-finance loans, visiting garment and textile facilities, meeting heads of organizations in charge of health care and education and attending a speech by alumnus Muhammad Yunus, who received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
The trip even took on a personal context for Asif Shah Mohammed, a second-year Owen student and native of Jamalpur, a village in Bangladesh.
"We had the opportunity to go to my own village and speak with actual micro-finance borrowers and villagers," Mohammed said.
Mohammed's family had done previous poverty alleviation work in his village, but he said this visit changed his view of Bangladesh.
"I look at Bangladesh differently now than prior to the trip because the greatest thing I saw was the work all the organizations working in Bangladesh had done to alleviate poverty," Mohammed said. "I saw a lot of opportunity for people like us in developing long-term solutions."
The group participants were able to have discussions with leaders from two of the largest non-governmental organizations in Bangladesh, Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee and Grameen Bank, including Yunus.
"It was extraordinary seeing Dr. Yunus talk about micro-lending and spending time in the villages," said Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership Bart Victor. "He's an extraordinarily inspirational leader and was very generous with his time and values Vanderbilt connections."
According to Igleheart, Project Pyramid hopes to return to Bangladesh next year and utilize the connections already made to further develop working business models to help stop poverty.
Project Pyramid is a student-founded initiative that began two years ago and includes students from each of the graduate schools. The purpose of Project Pyramid is to use business tools to work toward financially sustainable methods for poverty alleviation.
And the group is working to address issues globally and locally.
"There is a lot of poverty in Nashville that we can develop models to address," Igleheart said. "We look at both local and international opportunities to learn and create solutions because the same solutions that work overseas might not apply locally."
The graduate students, who came from Owen, the Divinity School, Law School, Peabody College and the College of Arts and Science, said they were encouraged by the work they and others were doing.
"This project has the promise of being successful because we're tackling poverty not just from the eyes of a business person," Igleheart said, "but from people of all backgrounds with different views working toward a common goal."
—Lily Chen can be reached at lily.z.chen@vanderbilt.edu
—To read more stories from the trip to Bangladesh, click here to go to the Owen Bloggers Web site.
—To view a slideshow of photos, click here.
 

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