The Pledge: ASA, Peasant Politics, and Microfinance in the Development of Bangladesh

Stuart Rutherford

Feb 2009 · Oxford University Press

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The Association for Social Advancement (ASA) of Bangladesh recently topped Forbes magazine's first-ever list of the world's best microfinance banks. This is an extraordinary achievement for an organization that started life as a revolutionary movement aiming to bring a peasant-led government to the newly created and desperately poor South Asian nation of Bangladesh. This book tells the story of how ASA's determined but practical-minded founder and leader, Shafiqual Haque Choudhury, steered his organization through the maze of competing ideas about how best to develop poor countries. The book sets Choudhury's accomplishments in the context of Bangladesh's chaotic but inspiring postcolonial history and is rich in its understanding and descriptions of how ordinary village and slum dwellers deal with the complicated web of politics, international donations, and development expertise. The author's long and intimate knowledge of ASA and of Bangladeshi microfinance makes this one of the best case studies of a development organization available to the general public.

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Stuart Rutherford is the founder of SafeSave Bangladesh, an organization that provides reliable basic banking services, profitably, to poor men, women, and children in Dhaka. He became interested in how poor people manage their lives and their money as a result of working in developing countries as an architect and then for NGOs. From this perspective he became involved in microfinance as a practitioner (in Bangladesh), teacher, consultant, and writer. He is the author of The Poor and Their Money (Oxford University Press, 2000) and is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester, UK. He lives in Japan.