Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nicholas P. Sullivan has written widely about technology and entrepreneurship, as well as international development issues. He is publisher of the journal Innovations: Technology/Governance/Globalization (MIT Press), and a partner in the Global Horizon Fund, a private-equity fund for emerging markets. This is his second book.
www.youcanhearmenow.com

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The Incredible Story behind GrameenPhone in Bangladesh, a Creation of Grameen Bank, Winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize

"Grameen Bank has an impact on the poor, GrameenPhone on the entire economy."
―Muhammad Yunus,winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize

"You Can Hear Me Now is a powerful proof of the roles that the private sector can play in economic development. Sullivan, by picking one industry―wireless―and cleverly weaving the economics and the growth of the industry with the human dimension, provides a distinctively new perspective on what is possible. A must-read for all those who are concerned about eradicating poverty. Equally, a must-read for managers who are looking for new engines of growth."
―C.K. Prahalad, Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor, The Ross School of Business, the University of Michigan; author, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

"With the growing interest in how business can better serve the 'bottom of the pyramid' there is great need for both practical examples of how to do it and better understanding of how such strategies can truly benefit those caught in the poverty trap. This book delivers on both counts."
―Stuart L. Hart, S.C. Johnson Chair of Sustainable Global Enterprise, Cornell University; author, Capitalism at the Crossroads

"You Can Hear Me Now describes the human drama of the poor adopting technology to enhance their productivity. Well-researched and engaging, it expertly walks the reader through one surprising maze after another."
―V. Kasturi Rangan, Malcolm P. McNair Professor of Marketing, Harvard Business School; coauthor, Business Solutions for the Global Poor

"The stories of GrameenPhone in Bangladesh, legendary in development capital circles, and Celtel in Africa, among others, read as colorfully as any of the stories of the Gold Rush in the U.S. in the 1840s. Nicholas Sullivan has recounted the struggle and subsequent success in an easy-to-read but factual manner that shows risks countered by perseverance and guts―proving that you can do well by doing good."
―Alan Patricof, co-founder, Apax Partners and founder, Greycroft Partners

www.youcanhearmenow.com

Aus dem Klappentext

"[T]he people of Bangladesh are a good investment inthe future . . . With loans for people to buy cell phones,entire villages are being brought into the Information Age.I want people throughout the world to know this story."
President Bill Clinton,Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2000

Bangladeshi villagers sharing cell phones helped build what is now a thriving company with more than $200 million in annual profits. But what is the lesson for the rest of the world? This is a question author Nicholas P. Sullivan addresses in his tale of a new kind of entrepreneur, Iqbal Quadir, the visionary and catalyst behind the creation of GrameenPhone in Bangladesh.

GrameenPhone a partnership between Norway's Telenor and Grameen Bank, co-winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize defines a new approach to building business opportunities in the developing world. You Can Hear Me Now offers a compelling account of what Sullivan calls the "external combustion engine" a combination of forces that is sparking economic growth and lifting people out of poverty in countries long dominated by aid-dependent governments. The "engine" comprises three forces: information technology, imported by native entrepreneurs trained in the West, backed by foreign investors.

GrameenPhone's successful effort to provide universal telephony in a country that had virtually no phones, using microloans generated by Muhammad Yunus, co-winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, confirms the power of bottom-up development, which is creating millions of income opportunities for the rural poor and billions of dollars in national income. With similar success stories in other poor countries such as those of Celtel, MTN, and Vodacom in sub-Saharan Africa, and of Globe Telecom and Smart Communications in the Philippines cell phones are spreading like wildfire across the Southern Hemisphere and are helping to bridge the digital divide. You Can Hear Me Now describes an inclusive capitalism that engages and enables many of the four billion people at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

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You Can Hear Me Now

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Travelers clearing customs at Dhaka International Airport in Bangladesh are greeted by three signs-one for Bangladeshi passport holders, one for foreign passport holders, and one for foreign investors. The first two lines are jammed. There is no third line. Foreign investors aren't exactly swarming one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world.

While I waited for my bags, I turned on my cell phone. In a few seconds it displayed the name of a local network operator, Grameen-Phone. That was gratifying, because I had come to Bangladesh to visit Iqbal Quadir, who had spearheaded the design and development of GrameenPhone. I had heard so much about this company and its seemingly mystical success in a land that was once virtually phone free, it was reassuring to see how quickly the carrier popped up on my American phone. Reassuring and amazing-that you can travel from the richest country in the world to one of the poorest, from a country with one of the highest telephone penetration rates to one with one of the lowest, and use the same phone.

Arriving in the predawn hours after a long flight from London in January 2005, I made no immediate link between the foreign investors sign and the GrameenPhone network connection, but of course there's a clear one to be made: GrameenPhone would not have been possible without foreign investors.

In 1993, when Quadir first began thinking about the possibility of building a universal cellular network in Bangladesh, more than half of its 120 million people (now nearly 150 million) lived on less than $1 a day. GDP per capita was $220. The adult literacy rate was 37 percent. Foreign direct investment (FDI) totaled a mere $3 million a year. Eighty percent of the country had no electricity. There was no sign welcoming foreign investors at the airport.

With a mere two phones for every 1,000 people, Bangladesh's tele-poverty rivaled that of Nepal. Only Dhaka, the capital and largest city, and Chittagong, the second city, had widespread phone "service," to use the term loosely. But that's not to say people didn't want phones; in 1993, there were more than a million applications for phone service on file. If you knew the right people, you could get a phone in five years; if not, ten was the norm. The completion rate on calls was around 20 percent, about what you'd expect from an Army field telephone in World War I. Taking a rickshaw ride through crowded streets to talk to someone in person, breathing the noxious exhaust of outboard motors powering the three-wheeled tuk-tuks (they now run on natural gas), was a much more effective way to communicate. The saw in Dhaka was, "First you get phone service, then you build your house around it." In 2005, a Dhaka newspaper ran the story of a sixty-year-old man who just received a fixed phone line after a twenty-seven-year wait. "I'm not sure why it has taken so long to get my telephone connected," Mohammed Ismail told BBC News. "I suppose it's because I'm an ordinary customer who didn't pay bribes." That is Bangladesh in a nutshell.

There were, and are, positives. Bangladesh is democratic, even though its government is consistently ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world by Transparency International. Women are more modern than in any other Muslim country, and the fertility rate dropped from 6.6 in 1975 to 3.1 in 2004. Many work (primarily in the garment industry) and rarely wear traditional burqas (opaque veils). Two women have alternated as prime minister since 1991. (They are mortal enemies and defy each other's efforts to lead, but that is a different problem.) The country has been relatively peaceful, compared to, say, Indonesia or Pakistan, except for occasional political murders and incessant hartals, or political strikes. Synchronized bombings across Bangladesh in 2005 and 2006 were a disconcerting signal that Islamic fundamentalists-who want to install Islamic law over the current British common law system-are now operating on the fringes, but they appear to have little traction. The country is rich in natural gas, exports are up to 14 percent of GDP, and the economy has been growing at 5 percent or better for almost ten years. Bangladeshis are incredibly hard working. "How can people work so hard and be so poor?" one of my Bangladeshi guides said to me as we drove through the crowded streets of Dhaka and watched a whirlwind of commerce in wall-to-wall shops at 11 P.M. Good question; one that Quadir has been thinking about for years.

The Liberation War (1971)

Quadir, a Bangladeshi American with a friendly face and piercing eyes, left Bangladesh as a teenager in 1976 to study in the United States, after five years of hell.

When Quadir was a child, Bangladesh was East Pakistan, formerly part of India's Bengal state, until Pakistan was partitioned off in 1947, the year of India's independence from the United Kingdom. In 1971, when Quadir was thirteen, East Pakistan declared itself independent of West Pakistan (today's Pakistan), and took the new name of Bangladesh (meaning "land of Bangla-speaking people"). West Pakistani soldiers invaded and went on a nine-month rampage of killing and rape, attacking especially the intellectual and professional classes. Joan Baez's "Song of Bangladesh" refers to pools of blood, shrieks of terror, and horrific deaths at universities. In the end, somewhere between 1 and 3 million Bangladeshis were killed. "It was like living in Germany for Jews," says Abdul-Muyeed Chowdhury, executive director of Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), one of the world's largest nongovernmental organizations. BRAC was founded after the war by Fazle Hasan Abed, a Shell Oil executive, to help resettle refugee Bangladeshis who had fled to India. "You didn't know if or when you'd be picked up; we were always living in the shadow of death."

Millions of East Pakistani refugees left towns and cities to escape the butchery, while heavy monsoon rains threatened a humanitarian disaster (and inspired George Harrison's Madison Square Garden concert). As Pakistani soldiers moved along roadways and waterways, Quadir's father moved the family from the small city of Jessore to his own father's house in a tranquil rural corner of the country.

The war ended when the Indian army moved in to stop the killing and drive out the West Pakistani army. Bangladesh was now independent. The next year Quadir's father died in a ferry accident, while saving his daughter. In 1974, devastating floods put most of Bangladesh under water and killed 1.5 million people. The teenage Quadir saw dead bodies floating down the rivers. The resultant famine didn't compare with that of 1943, when up to 9 million died as India's British rulers focused on the Japanese occupation of Burma (now Myanmar), to Bengal's east-but the mere memory of '43 opened wounds in the new country's psyche. In 1975, Sheikh Mujib, who had returned to govern after being released by his Pakistani jailers, was murdered along with his entire family (save his daughter Sheikh Hasina Wajed, who was in Germany at the time, and is now leader of the Awami League, a political party). (Sheikh Hasina was prime minister from 1996 to 2001.) After Mujib's murder, the military took control of the government. Bangladesh was free, but it was also a cauldron of poverty and corruption, with no connection to export markets and no way to...