Rachel Cook, Trinity ’06, is a testament to the virtues of a liberal arts education.
Drawing on her Duke undergraduate majors, English and economics—the former having cultivated an interest in storytelling, the latter an attention to detail—she is producing and directing the unfinished documentary Microlending Film: A Documentary about Enterprising Women.
After graduation, she worked as an equities and Eurodollar futures trader by night, using yield curves to predict the behavior of the economy. This experience informed Cook’s approach to her first endeavor in film, constructed from three interwoven vignettes of microfinance in Paraguay, Kenya and Bangladesh.
Cook’s work in the financial sector and interest in the work of op-ed New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof initially drew her attention to microfinance. A microloan is an advance as small as $25, usually given to impoverished but enterprising people of the developing world who might otherwise not have proper collateral to earn credit.
Microlending Film will highlight the role of microlending institutions in the financial education of women, who are often at a disadvantage in their own societies.
“A work situation completely dominated by one gender or the other [makes] the climate less productive overall,” Cook said.
Following the progress of several individuals, the documentary depicts them working to overcome gender biases and become viable members of their communities.
One of these women is Pablina, whose hometown of Ita is located 25 miles from Asuncion, Paraguay, where the microlending institute Fundacion Paraguay is located. Due to an invasive medical procedure to remove a cancerous tumor growing on her son’s liver, Pablina exhausted her life savings, leaving her too poor to continue making pan de miel, a local sweet bread that she sells to tourists at her makeshift roadside stand.
The first microloan Pablina accepted from Fundacion Paraguay was for $50. With this advance, she turned an existing skill into a profitable business. Pablina’s success enabled her to take on financial responsibilities in a male dominated society, such that her daughter Antonia can now attend agricultural school. Additionally, she has empowered other women to follow in her footsteps. As the president of a community of enterprising women, she is in charge of the management and repayment of the group’s loan.
“This documentary is important in order to highlight [how the effects of microfinance] percolate up from the local level to the international level, influencing communities of women on a micro and macro scale,” Neha Sabharwal, a sophomore member of the Duke Microfinance Leadership Initiative, wrote in an e-mail.
Sabharwal is one of four Duke students who accompanied Cook on her trip to Kenya last summer. Sabharwal said she values this project as a prototype for future innovative and artistic efforts to affect social change.
The mismanagement of loans both on the lending and receiving ends, however, is one unfortunate consequence of microfinance, Cook said. Plans to shoot in Bangladesh in the next month hope to shed light upon the microcredit controversy surrounding the Grameen Bank, founded by 2006 Noble Peace Price Winner and 2010 Duke Commencement Speaker, Mohammed Yunus. In the recent documentary Caught in Microdebt, Yunus was accused of using international donations towards for-profit ends, threatening both the future of the Grameen Bank as well as the very idea of microfinance.
Footage from other microlending initiatives in Kenya and Paraguay will also be integrated into the final documentary feature, which Cook expects to finish in Sept. 2011.
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