ASA of Bangladesh recently topped Forbes Magazine's first ever list of the world's best microfinance banks. This was an extraordinary outcome for an organization that had started life in 1978 as a revolutionary movement aiming to bring a peasant-led government to the newly-created and desperately poor South Asian nation of Bangladesh. The 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 achievement in th ... More

ASA of Bangladesh recently topped Forbes Magazine's first ever list of the world's best microfinance banks. This was an extraordinary outcome for an organization that had started life in 1978 as a revolutionary movement aiming to bring a peasant-led government to the newly-created and desperately poor South Asian nation of Bangladesh. The 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 achievement 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 what politicians, international donors, and development experts throw at them. ASA began by trying to foment a peasant-led revolution, but within a few years it became clear that villagers were not responding. Fearing that his donors would stop supporting him, Choudhury shifted ASA to a more conventional NGO role, delivering basic services in health, education, and legal advice and spending donor money on disaster relief. But by 1991 Choudhury became convinced that microfinance would prove the most sustainable way of developing Bangladesh and of making ASA a permanent institution. There then followed a period of rapid growth until by 2008 ASA was serving more than six million poor Bangladeshis with financial services and was readying a massive privately financed for-profit replication of its work in a dozen poor Asia and African countries.