Broadening Perspectives
Grameen Bank as a Supporter of Rural Poor: Evidence from Vulnerable Villages
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Khaled Shukran, Farhana Rahman
This paper examines Grameen Bank microfinance and its impact on the sustainability of rural development. It illustrates that the Grameen Bank loan giving process enhances the lives of poor people and helps them to come out from the vicious cycle of poverty. The research makes a particular contribution for the scholars to know how Grameen loan changes the life of the rural poor and works as an unknown mechanism for the socio-economic development of the rural community. This approach enables the researchers to study the status of the poor, ultra-poor, hard-core, and vulnerable people and examine both social and economic development of life through Grameen Bank’s initiatives that influence to break the vicious cycle of poverty. The researcher finds that Grameen Bank microfinance has facilitated underprivileged and vulnerable to become self-dependent by creating a permanent income that improves their social-economic status with social identity. The results also suggest that the impacts of Grameen Bank microfinance have long-lasting effects on the rural development process. The main contribution of this work is to explicitly evaluate the social and economic implications of Grameen Bank on the sustainable rural development targeting to the intervention of a more efficient way.
Exploring Intercepts of Mathematics Learning, Culture, and Sustainability through an Afrocentric Worldview
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kwesi Yaro
The knowledge and experiences of Africans living in diaspora are usually absorbed into the categories of other minority groups and people of colour in general (Tillman, 2002). Some scholars have expressed concern that mainstream education has almost always framed communities of colour as “deficient” (Anderson, Anderson, Friedrich, & Kim, 2010). This “deficit” notion about students of colour contrasts efforts of ensuring culturally responsive education and research that acknowledge diverse cultural views and strategies as useful resources in meaning making and research inquiry. In this study, I draw on Asante’s (1991) notion of “Afrocentricity” engage audience on the intercept of mathematics, culture, and sustainability. Specifically, I will draw on qualitative data from two separate research studies with African immigrants in Vancouver and families in rural communities in West Africa to elucidate the relevance of socio-cultural elements, resources, contexts of marginalised families and communities, and how these could be drawn upon in ensuring “meaningful” mathematics teaching and learning that speak to the real-life experiences of people of colour. Afrocentricity is a “frame of reference wherein phenomena are viewed from an African worldview (Asante, 1991). Afrocentric worldview assumes that people of African descent and other marginalised groups indeed possess cultural experiences worthy of intellectual pursuit and their experiences are unique and can prove instructive about human interactions and learning. Thus, the thesis of this research is that "meaningful" mathematics teaching cannot be devoid of people’s cultural, historical, political, and economic backgrounds, especially people of African descent and other marginalised cultural groups.
