Microlending also offers many families a way into the middle class. Take the case of Riziya Begum, who bought her first cow with a $30 loan from Grameen Bank. Before that, she and her husband were among the millions of poor farmers in Bangladesh, growing rice and living day to day.


"Sometimes I ate, sometimes I didn't have food," she says, sitting in her corrugated-tin house - the equivalent of a middle-class home in Basta. Begum, who is about 40 (she doesn't know her birth date), bought land with the money she earned from selling cows. She sent her eldest son to work in Saudi Arabia with money she earned from selling some of her land. And he sent enough money home a few years ago for her to buy a TV.


Begum also has her own well for drinking water, a second plot of land on which she and her husband plan to build brick homes for their two sons when they get married, and an electric fan. "Even my cow has a fan now," she says.


But her greatest pride is her 8-year-old daughter, Aklima, who attends school every day - the first girl in many generations of Begum's family to have an education. Begum is considering taking out a Grameen higher-education loan to send Aklima to a university. Aklima, it turns out, wants to be a doctor. "I saw it on TV," she says.