Earlier this week, British-Bangladeshi financier Faisel Rahman was awarded the “Big Society Award” by British Prime Minister David Cameron.
“Fair Finance has supported 200 London businesses to access the finance they need to get started or grow,” the prime minister said. “I’m delighted to be recognising the boost Fair Finance provides with this Big Society Award.”
Faisel Rahman, CEO of Fair Finance in the UK, Faisel adopted microfinance practices traditionally associated with developing countries like Bangladesh to help start-up businesses in London with loans of up to GBP20,000.
After working at the Grameen Bank and World Bank in Bangladesh, he developed the first microcredit program in the UK 2000.
With Britain’s banks reluctant to lend to small businesses in the wake of the financial crisis, Faisal’s company Fair Finance is targeting those he calls the “financially excluded,” essentially poorer people who make up what the big retail banks regard as the tainted “sub-prime” market.
Speaking to the Financial Times Faisel said: “Many people starting or growing their business are struggling to access the credit they need to succeed and grow… Our ambition is to work with those not able to access traditional financing products, in many cases alongside banks, to help them achieve their business aspirations.”
Faisel Rahman is the son of first-generation immigrants from Bangladesh to the UK. According to a profile in the Guardian, his parents fled during the Liberation War in 1971. He grew up with financial exclusion in south and east London, where doorstep lenders and loan sharks were often the only way of getting credit.
Rahman's father worked by day and studied accountancy at night, and his son picked up on some of his ambition. Rahman won a place at Cambridge University, and upon graduating came to Bangladesh, where he was seduced by the landmark social experiment of Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank.
The Big Society Awards were introduced in 2010 as part of Prime Minister David Cameron’s “Big Society” initiative which aims to encourage social businesses and voluntary organizations to provide public services in the place of government as part of a doctrine of “collective action and collective responsibility.” Critics of Big Society have argued that the concept is ill-defined and merely designed to justify the government’s program of deep public spending cuts.
