The grameen village telephone lady was one of the first franchises that microcredit invented to create hundreds of thousands of jobs – at the time (1996) the highest paid job ultra=poor women villagers had ever co-created.

How’s that?

Grameen Mobile linkedin various dynamics that were unique to the Grameen Microcredit model including:

The structure of the bank is networked around 100000 village hubs (aka centres) which are not just places where savings and loans are practiced weekly by groups of 60 microentrepreneurs, but hubs for sharing women villagers knowledge each of which also acts as a community markets owned by the poorest

Prior to 1996 the only cross-fertilisation of knowledge between these hubs was from the local branch of Grameen staff who visited each of a cluster of 60 neighbouring centres weeks. After 1996, the telephone ladies hooked up a 100000 hub network. These shared telephones acted like the telegram office must have done in the wild west a century earlier. The focus of telecommunications was life critical knowledge and market critical pricing. And the poorest village mothers were at the epicenter of this entrepreneurial revolution.

From the very start Grameen mobile was interested in exploring the smartest uses a net connected world could make in terms of empowering interpersonal productivity and bringing down degrees of separation of life critical information flows.

Today the fusion of microcredit and micromobile all over the world is one of the most exciting dynamics the net generation. For example, Bangladesh is in a friendly collaboration race with Jack Ma (ali baba, “China’s ebay”) to see which country’s world trade leadership of village mobile will generate 100 million jobs first.

The basic value multiplier of the service economy has been identified as the franchise by intrapreneurs since around 1980. What’s curious as the founder of the extraordinary social business franchise aravind and his expert medical friend (former ceo of google.org) Larry Brilliant say is why we have so many franchises owned so the top takes a cut every quarter from every franchises’ location and so few that are open source replicated for ownership by the communities and peoples who do the work 24/7.

So Grameen Mobile can be seen as a journey  exploring 2 extraordinary value multiplying experiments – mobilising knowledge across grassroots network hubs and open franchise replication, assisted by a life changing piece of technology,  owned by the communities poorest. This can not only change the world, but change every interfacing system dynamic that economists have ever mapped.

Reference 2011 Microcreidt Summit