A Fistful of Rice

In many levels, this is a beautiful book. It wraps around a beautiful idea: that not only is it possible to truly help people help themselves, but you can do that on a huge scale.
It’s about the power of vision and persistence, and the ripple effect of one man’s drive to improve the lot of millions of people.
A Fistful of Rice charts the creation and expansion of SKS Microfinance, a company that provides loans to women in some of the poorest regions of India.
Vikram Akula, the company’s founder and current chairperson, was born in the south Indian city of Hyderabad but lived in upstate New York in the US from the age of two.
Two decades ago he went to India as a community organiser of women’s self-help groups for the Deccan Development Society, a non-profit working in India’s rural Andhra Pradesh. His work there opened his eyes both to the benefits of providing tiny loans and to the limitations of traditional microfinance models.
In 1998 he set up his own not-for-profit, SKS Microfinance. Even today, loans are just US$44 to US$260 each but this is enough to enable a woman to buy a goat or buffalo, or set up a tiny village shop and make a world of difference 
Since 2005, the controversial bit has been that Akula loans at a profit. No matter that this profit is then ploughed back into the company to help even more people – right from the start, microfinance traditionalists have thrown their hands up in horror.
Akula has always argued that it’s nice to be able to help a few people but unless microfinance can achieve scale it will always remain in the ‘nice but insignificant’ basket. 
Perhaps the numbers say it best. When I checked SKS Microfinance’s website it showed that at the end of last year its philanthropic capitalism had distributed US$4.79 billion worth of funds to 7.7 million people via 2403 branches in India.
He’s got some powerful backers. In 2006 Time magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people. He’s racked up a string of other awards including the Ernst & Young Start-Up Entrepreneur of the Year in India (2006) and the World Economic Young Global Leader 2008.
Clearly, despite the rumblings from old-school philanthropists, Akula’s new thinking on how to tackle the age-old problem of poverty is gaining ground.
A Fistful of Rice is an easy read. I could have gulped it down in one evening. But I liked it so much that I deliberately left a bit to enjoy another day.
Akula specialises in short sentences. And he uses a curious classic murder-mystery ‘little did I know what would happen next…’ pre-emptive style that draws the reader on.
I have two tiny niggles. The sudden start to the book felt like someone had ripped out the first couple of pages. Or maybe I was just easily startled that day.
And the cover falls off all the time, gets stuck in pages and generally makes a nuisance of itself. Its tactile embossing is so beautiful, and the hard cover beneath so boring, that I stubbornly refused to take it off and so spent the whole time annoying myself. Again, maybe that’s just me.
I’m not sure that usefulness is the appropriate scale on which to grade this book. But if I could create an inspiration scale, I’d give it a nine out of 10!