GP’s Palli-phone women are gone

Victorian stories about ‘phone women’ in Bangladesh who are fighting their way out of poverty by selling units of Grameenphone turn serious cracks, reports NRK, the Norwegian state-run television.

Harald Eraker, a Swedish-born journalist, wrote the story for the television. The TV ran the story on December 1.

The report says the company boasts on its website that the Village Phone programme has 270,000 “telephone women” in 50,000 villages that sell units for them.

Yunus himself was full of praise for the programme when he gave his speech while receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. “Telephone-ladies quickly learned and innovated the telephone business, which has become the fastest way to get out of poverty and achieved social respectability. Today there are nearly 300,000 telephone ladies providing telephone services in villages of Bangladesh.”

The truth is that today there is no longer any phone woman, the report says.

Grameen Telecom, which owns Grameenphone together with Telenor, has a record of so-called Village Phone programme, and listed with 3,81,000 customers.

But this is the sale of SIM cards to regular customers, and not to women who sell phone calls to others and make money, the report commented.

It said that sales of mobile phones has exploded in Bangladesh and the people therefore have no need for the mobile ‘phone kiosks’ that phone women previously represented.

It has been a dramatic decline in the number of telephone women, the NRK report quoted Information Manager Esben Tuman of Telenor as saying.

“If there are any telephone women who still rent out their mobiles, there is little evidence to suggest that there are a few of them that come out of poverty through the Village Phone programme,” he was further quoted.

The reference of a book by Mazharul Hannan, one of the bosses of Grameen Telecom, was also given in the report where he said, “The programme (Village Phone) is not dead, but is no longer a way out of poverty.”

The report mentioned Professor Yunus had made a new “ground-breaking idea”. That was the message from the Norwegian Embassy in Dhaka in a memo marked “not public” that was sent to Norad on November 7, 1994.

The breakthrough idea was to create a new “non-profit corporation” with the name Grameenphone. And its spine should be women in rural areas that would be helped out of poverty: “The women will, through borrowing, buy the phone and make money by renting out phone calls to individuals.”

Sixteen years later, Grameenphone was owned by Norwegian Telenor (55.8%) and Grameen Telecom (34.2%), one of the most successful companies in Bangladesh. The company has granted Telenor huge profits.

According to Telenor, Grameenphone made a dividend of NOK 855 million over the past eight years.

“So how was a “non-profit company, which would help women out of poverty, linked to a purely commercial company that gave the Norwegian telecom giant huge profits?” The report raised a question.

It also said millions of borrowers in the bank, mostly poor women, were encouraged to take up a new loan to buy a mobile phone from Grameen Telecom, which together with Telenor owns Grameenphone.

The report mentioned, in other words, four Grameen companies involved in the phone women’s lives in the following way: Grameen Bank gave micro-credit so that women could buy phones from Grameen Telecom and Grameen Shakti sells solar panels so that Telephone women can charge their phones for using the Grameenphone connection.