Enterprising Women Help Make the Call

They help seal deals, find out the price of shrimp in rival fishing villages and even mediate marriage ceremonies from across the seas.

They are the “telephone ladies” of Bangladesh, sari-clad entrepreneurs who give globalization true meaning, proffering their cellphones in remote villages where telephone lines are few.

They are the shining stars of the microcredit financing world, a system of small loans based on a model established in this impoverished South Asian nation, where the average person lives on a dollar a day.

About 41,000 women have bought cellphones with no-collateral loans from Grameen Bank, the brainchild of Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus.

Bangladesh, plagued by monsoon floods, government corruption and poverty, has only about three telephone lines per 1,000 people.

Today, the telephone ladies offer phone services in almost half the villages, charging fees for phone calls that help farmers, fishermen and families connect with their colleagues, competitors and loved ones worldwide.

“This is a form of globalization. They have the whole world at their fingertips,” Yunus said.

Anju Monwara has been a telephone lady for six years in the village of Kashipur, north of the capital, Dhaka. She earns on average $50 a month, making and taking phone calls for others. That’s nearly double what most Bangladeshis earn.

She traipses through the village, along the rice paddies, and up and over the small hills to find the family of a man who has just phoned from Dubai and will call back in 15 minutes to talk to his wife and check on the condition of a sick child.

About half the 2,500 people in Kashipur have someone abroad, most in Persian Gulf countries, working in restaurants, shops or on construction sites.

The telephone ladies charge 5 takas a minute -- about 9 cents -- for local calls and 7.5 takas a minute (about 13 cents) for long-distance calls.

“It’s hard work, especially in the rainy season when it’s all muddy,” Monwara said. “But when somebody calls, I have to go.”

Her most memorable, and profitable, call was a 36-minute marriage ceremony between a woman and a fellow villager on a construction site in Saudi Arabia. He had sent a wedding ring and some money, but could not afford to come home.

“So he brought a local registrar with him and they said their vows over the phone.”