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Dr. Muhammad Yunus
b. June 28, 1940
 Muhammad
Yunus is the third (Fourth counting
Mother Teresa) Bengali and the only
Bangladeshi to be awarded the Nobel Prize. He is recognized throughout the
world for his successful implementation of microcredit. He came to
Vanderbilt University with a
Fulbright scholarship in 1965 and obtained
his Ph.D. in 1969. He taught at
Middle
Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN from 1969 to 1972
and published "Bangladesh Newsletter" from his home in Nashville to support
the "Liberation war of Bangladesh". He returned to his home in Bangladesh
and worked briefly at Bangladesh Planning Commission. He later joined
Chittagong University as head of the Economics department. It is
here he got involved with poverty reduction and saw the power of microcredit
when he loaned a total of USD 27/- from his own pocket to 42 women in a
village to get them out of loans they had taken from loan sharks. He
realized that such poor people could not get traditional loans from
financial institution as they had nothing to serve as collateral and the
amount they needed were quite small. He put to practice the idea of
microcredit as a tool to poverty reduction pioneered by
Dr. Akhtar Hameed Khan. Dr. Yunus believed
that given the chance the poor would repay a loan. His activities led to the
establishment of the Grameen bank on October 1, 1983. The rest as they say
is history. As of July 2007, Grameen Bank has issued US$ 6.38 billion to 7.4
million borrowers. In recognition of his contribution to poverty reduction,
Dr Yonus along with
Grameen Bank was awarded the
Nobel
Peace Prize in 2006.
More on Dr. Muhammad Yunus:
www.nobelprize.org
In his own words:
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I firmly believe that we can create a
poverty-free world if we collectively believe in it. In a
poverty-free world, the only place you would be able to see poverty
is in the poverty museums. When school children take a tour of the
poverty museums, they would be horrified to see the misery and
indignity that some human beings had to go through. They would blame
their forefathers for tolerating this inhuman condition, which
existed for so long, for so many people.
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But we have created a society that
does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of
themselves because we have denied them those opportunities.
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Here we were talking about economic
development, about investing billions of dollars in various
programs, and I could see it wasn't billions of dollars people
needed right away. |
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I made a list of people who needed
just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there
were 42 names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was
shocked. |
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I wanted to give money to people like
this woman so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell
their product at the price which the markets gave them - which was
much higher than what the trader was giving them.
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I went to the bank and proposed that
they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.
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If you look at the gender composition
of all the borrowers of all the banks in Bangladesh, not even 1% of
the borrowers happen to be women. |
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Poverty is unnecessary.
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Soon we saw that money going to women
brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men.
So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a
result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are
women. |
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They explained to me that the bank
cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not
creditworthy. |
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Today, if you look at financial
systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world
- out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not
qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame. .
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