To address the problem of poverty in rural villages, she created microcredit programs while working as a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development.

Towards the latter part of her life, she worked with Bank Rakyat Indonesia, where she helped apply her research to the largest microfinance program in the world.

[4] In an interview, Barack Obama referred to his mother as "the dominant figure in [his] formative years", adding, "The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics.

[9] Ancestry.com claimed on July 30, 2012, after using a combination of old documents and yDNA analysis, that Dunham's mother was descended from John Punch, an African slave in seventeenth-century colonial Virginia.

[12] After the attack on Pearl Harbor, her father joined the United States Army, and her mother worked at a Boeing plant in Wichita.

[17] In 1955, the family moved to Seattle, Washington, where her father was employed as a furniture salesman and her mother worked as vice president of a bank.

[5] At the school, teachers Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman taught the importance of challenging social norms and questioning authority to the young Dunham, and she took the lessons to heart: "She felt she didn't need to date or marry or have children."

[20][21] At the age of 25, Obama Sr. had come to Hawaii to pursue his education, leaving behind a pregnant wife, Kezia, and their infant son in his home town of Nyang'oma Kogelo in Kenya.

[21][35] The family first lived at 16 Kyai Haji Ramli Tengah Street in a newly built neighborhood in the Menteng Dalam administrative village of the Tebet subdistrict in South Jakarta for two and a half years, with her son attending the nearby Indonesian-language Santo Fransiskus Asisi (St. Francis of Assisi) Catholic School for 1st, 2nd, and part of 3rd grade, then in 1970 moved two miles north to 22 Taman Amir Hamzah Street in the Matraman Dalam neighborhood in the Pegangsaan administrative village of the Menteng subdistrict in Central Jakarta, with her son attending the Indonesian-language government-run Besuki School one and half miles east in the exclusive Menteng administrative village of the Menteng subdistrict for part of 3rd grade and for 4th grade.

[12] In Indonesia, Dunham enriched her son's education with correspondence courses in English, recordings of Mahalia Jackson, and speeches by Martin Luther King Jr.

[34] Madelyn Dunham's job at the Bank of Hawaii, where she had worked her way up over a decade from clerk to becoming one of its first two female vice presidents in 1970, helped pay the steep tuition,[38] with some assistance from a scholarship.

[44] From January 1968 to December 1969, Dunham taught English and was an assistant director of the Lembaga Persahabatan Indonesia Amerika (LIA)–the Indonesia-America Friendship Institute at 9 Teuku Umar Street in the Gondangdia administrative village of the Menteng subdistrict in Central Jakarta–which was subsidized by the United States government.

[41][47] In May and June 1978, Dunham was a short-term consultant in the office of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Jakarta, writing recommendations on village industries and other non-agricultural enterprises for the Indonesian government's third five-year development plan (REPELITA III).

[40] On August 9, 1992, she was awarded PhD in anthropology from the University of Hawaii, under the supervision of Alice G. Dewey, with a 1,043-page dissertation[50] titled Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving and thriving against all odds.

[52] According to Dove, Dunham's dissertation challenged popular perceptions regarding economically and politically marginalized groups, and countered the notions that the roots of poverty lie with the poor themselves and that cultural differences are responsible for the gap between less-developed countries and the industrialized West.

[52] According to Dove, Dunham found that the villagers she studied in Central Java had many of the same economic needs, beliefs and aspirations as the most capitalist of Westerners.

As she wrote in her dissertation, "many government programs inadvertently foster stratification by channeling resources through village officials", who then used the money to strengthen their own status further.

On November 11, 2010, for her research on women's role, socio-economic empowerment, and micro-credit on rural villages, her son Barack Obama received the Main Star of Service in her name given by the Government of Indonesia.

[54][55][34][56][57] Following a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, Obama and his sister spread their mother's ashes in the Pacific Ocean at Lanai Lookout on the south side of Oahu.

[57]Dunham's employer-provided health insurance covered most of the costs of her medical treatment, leaving her to pay the deductible and uncovered expenses, which came to several hundred dollars per month.

[60] In December 2009, Duke University Press published a version of Dunham's dissertation titled Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia.

In his afterword, Boston University anthropologist Robert W. Hefner describes Dunham's research as "prescient" and her legacy as "relevant today for anthropology, Indonesian studies, and engaged scholarship".

[65] A lengthy major biography of Dunham by former New York Times reporter Janny Scott, titled A Singular Woman, was published in 2011.

[68] In the 2016 film Barry, a dramatization of Barack Obama's life as an undergraduate college student, Dunham is played by Ashley Judd.

In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama wrote, "My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess...

In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship ... she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.

"[70] In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote, "I was not raised in a religious household ... My mother's own experiences ... only reinforced this inherited skepticism.

She basically gave us all the good books—the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching—and wanted us to recognize that everyone has something beautiful to contribute.

Their daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, chose to keep the traditional spelling of her Indonesian surname.Mary Toutonghi ... recalls as best she can the dates she baby sat Barack as her daughter was 18 months old and was born in July of 1959 and that would have placed the months of babysitting Barack in January and February of 1962 ... Anna was taking night classes at the University of Washington, and according to the University of Washington's registrar's office her major was listed as history.

Along with the Seattle Polk Directory, Marc Leavipp of the University of Washington Registrar's office confirms 516 13th Ave. E. was the address Ann Dunham had given upon registering at the University.Actually I had hoped to move to Jogja at midyear, but was unable to win a contract release from my old school in Jakarta (they sponsored me via an Asia Foundation grant for my first two years in Hawaii).