When she was 15, the Tunisian micro-finance pioneer Essma ben Hamida acquired an oud and began learning to play but her parents made her stop.
Biobox: Essma ben Hamida Born in Kairouane in the early 1950s, raised in the village of Akouda near the coastal city of Sousse. Co-founded Enda Inter-Arabe in 1990
Last Updated: May 06, 2011
Favourite food Food "Couscous made by my mother."
Favourite gadget "My iPod, which allows me to listen to Mohammed Abdel Wahab, Umm Kulthum and Saliha, a great Tunisian singer."
Favourite music "Many songs of Umm Kulthum, such as Taht el Yasmina fi Leil(Under the Jasmine by Night)."
Favourite film Le Silence des Palais (The Silence of the Palaces).
Favourite car "One that consumes little and doesn't pollute; ideally, electric."
Anything else? ? "Cats. We have two cats at home, and they keep me grounded.
"I wanted to do theatre and music, to become the [late singing star] Oum Kalthoum of Tunisia," says Mrs ben Hamida. "I wanted to overcome the boundaries of my country and my village."
Mrs ben Hamida grew up in the Tunisian village of Akouda, near the coastal city of Sousse, where in the 1960s girls did not play instruments, or go to university, or do much of anything besides get married, she says.
Last October, she travelled to a World Economic Forum summit in Marrakech, Morocco, where she was named the Middle East and North Africa region's social entrepreneur of the year last year for groundbreaking work in micro-credits that has helped thousands of Tunisians lift themselves out of poverty.
The award was Mrs ben Hamida's latest achievement in a career that has taken her from rural obscurity, through the corridors of power, to her current vocation helping those whom power has eluded.
She was born about 60 years ago - she declines to offer a precise date - one of five daughters of a tailor and his wife. One of her grandfathers was a lawyer and as a girl she would put on his black robe and play at being a lawyer, too.
"But my grandfather told me that in Tunisia, girls don't grow up to become lawyers," she says.
That began changing after the country gained independence from French colonial rule in 1956, with the modernising president Habib Bourguiba assuming power the following year.
Often likened to Turkey's former president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk for his forward-looking policies, Mr Bourguiba considered female emancipation central to building a modern state and expanded women's rights during his three decades in power.
Mrs ben Hamida studied geography at university before veering into journalism as a presenter for a state Arabic-language TV channel. Along the way she married, had a daughter and divorced. Meanwhile, she struggled for the respect of her boss, who resisted allowing her to handle interviews on the grounds she was female, she says.
"So one day I took my daughter and my suitcase and went to Paris."
For two years Mrs ben Hamida studied town planning at the Institut d'Urbanisme on a grant from the Tunisian government. In 1977 she went to New York, intending to spend three months doing research; she stayed for three years.
"I was poor, but it was marvellous," she says. "To be a woman in New York was to be able to dance, to sing, to do the things that I couldn't do before."
At soirees in her apartment she sang to her friends, most often the songs of Umm Kulthum.
Soon she was hired by Tunisia's state news agency, TAP, to open a New York bureau covering North America and the UN. She learned on the job: how to speak English; how to file articles using a Telex machine; how to untangle the intricacies of UN diplomacy.
"And I dreamed," she says. "In the corridors of the UN, in the conference rooms, I thought that I could change the world."
A procession of world leaders passed through the chambers of the UN, radiating power. There was ringing talk of developing the Third World and eradicating poverty. Mrs ben Hamida visited trouble spots such as Lebanon and Iraq, covering the work of UN agencies.
She recalls an interview with Yasser Arafat in Beirut, as civil war raged in Lebanon. "We will meet someday in Jerusalem," he told her as they bade each other farewell.
"It was magical. I felt I was stealing these little moments of history," she says. "Even if I couldn't do great things, I was there."
Then the familiar spectre of male dominance returned: a new supervisor who did not agree with women in positions of authority. In frustration, Mrs ben Hamida quit her job.
In 1980 she moved to Rome to work for the International Foundation for Development Alternatives, a Swiss non-profit research foundation. At the same time, she covered UN activities as a correspondent for the Inter Press Service news agency.
Ultimately, Mrs ben Hamida began to see "the gap between the speeches at UN conferences and reality", she says. "I decided that enough was enough: it was time to stop writing and start taking action."
In 1990, she returned to Tunisia with her English husband, Michael Cracknell, where together they founded the charity Enda Inter-Arabe. Headquartered in the capital, Tunis, Enda focused initially on educating poor people, especially women.
That quest took Enda to Hay Tadhamoun, a sprawling working-class neighbourhood in Tunis that was first port of call for migrants from the countryside - "a real melting pot", says Mrs ben Hamida.
A poll of unemployed women conducted by Enda in 1994 found many lacked skills and capital, while many craftswomen did not know where to sell their works. Thus came the decision to add micro-credit to Enda's activities.
"We were nervous about introducing a new concept," says Mrs ben Hamida. "We knew it wouldn't be easy to change mentalities - to give credit in place of charity."
However, the following year, Enda - which stands for Environment, Development, Action - shifted to providing micro-credit loans, funded mainly by various non-profit charity groups and foreign embassies in Tunisia. The organisation has been self-sufficient since 2003.
"It was a way of showing the government that micro-finance can be sustainable," Mrs ben Hamida says. "That the poor are capable of getting credit and repaying it."
Today, Tunisia's government has also embraced micro finance, with various schemes provided by state agencies.
While the country's economy has grown thanks to economic liberalisation in recent decades, unemployment stands at 14 per cent and is most severe among young people.
Most of Enda's 158,000 clients have little or no education, says Mrs ben Hamida, but the organisation reports a 99.5 per cent repayment rate on its loans, distributed as lines of credit rather than lump sums.
"Above all, we use micro-credit to empower women," she says.
Gatherings and workshops held regularly in Enda's offices around Tunisia help women entrepreneurs meet each another, since the usual place for business contacts - the cafes - are traditionally the preserve of men.
"For me, the greatest success is that we've changed mentalities," Mrs ben Hamida says. "At first, women said they would accept what we decided. Two years later, they were banging on the table and telling us what they wanted."
Now Mrs ben Hamida is preparing to hand the reins of Enda to a successor.
"Not to retire - retirement is death - but to move on to something else," she says. "I did not become Umm Kulthum. But I fulfilled a need to serve and to do something lasting."