Write a 500-word essay comparing the advantages and disadvantages of the two strategies for alleviating poverty and decide which proposal is more likely to help in the relief of poverty in both the developed and the developing world.

Resources: Chapter Five: ?A Pilot Project is Born? and Chapter Eight: “Growth and Challenges for the Bank for the Poor, 1984-1990.”Muhammad Yunus, Founder of the Grameen Bank:Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty.New York: Public Affairs, 2003

Steps: On one page, from what you can tell from reading Chapter Five:

Explain what the Grameen Project is and how it works.

Describe in your own words how Yunus gets women to join his project and why it?s so difficult.

Tell the story of one of the women other than Ammajan Amina (page 81).

On a second page: Use specifics in Chapter Eight to compare the Grameen Project with the IMF?s project.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of each model, bottom up and top down?

Which model do you think would be most helpful in relieving poverty in the developing world?

Yunus gives criticisms of the World Bank in Chapter Eight, and not the IMF. The two institutions are not the same. For our purposes, we?ll consider the World Bank to be roughly equivalent to the IMF.

Be sure to include at least two of Yunus’ criticisms in your essay.

Evaluate Two Models for Lesser-Developed Countries.

The first is the “top-down” model of the IMF. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) provides loans to governments, which use them to stimulate economic growth.

Stiglitz’s criticisms of the IMF’s idea that one policy fits all lesser-developed countries are telling, and it’s interesting to note that the Fund is moving to a realization that the governments of lesser-developed countries need to have greater control over the movement of capital and the direction of trade.

The second model for attacking poverty, the “bottom-up” model, is offered by Muhammad Yunus, who has a plan for working with very poor individuals. By making small loans to individuals, he seeks to raise a community’s overall economic well-being.