I am in Uganda with CARE International UK, as an ambassador for the charity, looking at their remarkable Banking on Change programme which they are jointly running with another charity - Plan International.
Worldwide, 2.5billion people are excluded from financial security and the fruits of sound advice on how to better their material condition.
The partner is Barclays, beset by problems at home yet doing amazing work here and elsewhere.
The link is logical: small farmers group together into village savings and loans groups, from self-support and self-sufficiency, they progress to setting up a group bank account; as individuals progress they then create private and business accounts.
Alastair Stewart in Uganda copyright CARE International
The amounts are modest - a few hundred pounds equivalent from the group - but the transformation, phenomenal. I met Suzan, a woman who had a tiny flock of chickens and now has hundreds. She sells her eggs widely and generates surplus income for herself and her family.
Hasan farmed his father's smallholding and now runs a successful mobile phone business in Iganga, the local market town. He is also putting himself through university doing, not surprisingly, a bachelors degree in Business Studies. And so it goes on.
Two thoughts are already drilled into my mind: having one's money secure, however much or little, is a universal good; coupling it with sound advice from the charity sector is truly transformational in a country like Uganda.
The second is this: whatever happened on LIBOR and in the esoteric derivatives markets, when banks stick to basics, with good people in control, they can change lives for the better. They have their commercial motives and I don't begrudge them those.
But for Suzan, Hasan and many others, it is an offer they are happy to embrace and, patently, for the better.
Without this programme, poverty and fear would remain enshrined. With it, there's a real chance of financial security, liberty and progress from a bleak condition to a better place.
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Uganda - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background Note: Uganda - U.S. Department of State
BBC News - Uganda country profile
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Uganda-Zambia: A history of titanic battles
Economic model has failed Uganda
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Yeah, we used to think along similar lines here till we got stitched up by them. Amazing isn't it, people are closing their accounts over frauds committed by our banks and out of the blue we get the sympathy stance from another over privileged media person. Call me a cynic but what sort of bonus did you get for penning this from Barclays
Mosquitoes have their motives too. They don’t set out to annihilate humankind. Its just the law of unintended consequences. Like creating genetically modified crops to increase the food supply. Then enslaving the producers, by commercial control of that seed supply. What is it that we are attempting here? Not one of these business concerns can exist without humanity. So by waging war against the people, they wage war against their own longevity. If Mosquitoes cannot be regulated, then the alternative is their annihilation. Maybe they could evolve before that becomes a necessity. Or is that as likely as commercialism mutating into altruism?