“We believe that poverty does not belong to a civilized human society. It belongs to museums.”
“All human beings have an innate skill – survival skill. The fact that poor are still alive is a proof of their ability to survive. We do not need to teach them how to survive. They know this already. ” This firm faith in basic human ability drove the man, named Mohammad Yunus, to turn a dream called ‘Grameen Bank’ into a $2.5 billion (US) reality.
Dr. Mohammad Yunus was born to a well-to-do family in Chittagong, a business center in Bangladesh, in 1940. His father was a successful goldsmith who always encouraged his sons to seek higher education. But his biggest influence was his mother, Sofia Khatun, who always helped any poor that knocked on their door. This inspired him to commit himself to eradication of poverty.
Dr. Yunus lives modestly in a two-bedroom apartment at Grameen Banks headquarters in Dhaka, Bangladesh with his physicist wife, Afrozi and their daughter Deena.
Yunus was an outstanding student who won a Fullbright Fellowship to do PhD at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1965. He returned home in 1972 to become the head of the economics department at the Chittagong University. He found the situation in newly independent Bangladesh worsening day by day. The terrible famine of 1974 in Bangladesh changed his life forever. He thought that while people were dying of hunger on the streets, he was teaching elegant theories of economics. He felt the inadequacies of elegant theories of economics and decided to make the poor his teachers. He began to study them and question them on their lives. One day, interviewing a woman who made bamboo stools, he learnt that, because she had no capital of her own, she had to give up more than 93% of her proceeds to the middleman. Dr. Yunus identified the problem as one of structure. Lack of credit to the poor. He thinks that people are poor today because of the failure of the financial institutions to support them in the past. Thus the idea of micro-credit was born. The idea is terribly simple and in the area of development and aid completely revolutionary.
The Grameen Bank (in Bengali, Grameen means rural) which Dr. Yunus has built over the last 22 years, is today the largest rural bank in Bangladesh. It has over 2 million borrowers and works in 35000 villages in a country of 68000 villages. 94 % of its borrowers are women. The bank is based on simple, sensible rules, meticulous organization, imagination and peer pressure among borrowers. The break that Grameen Bank offers is a collateral-free loan, sometimes equivalent to just a few U.S. dollars and rarely more than $100. In rural areas, it makes things happen. 98% of its loans are honored. Thus he has turned into reality a philosophy that the poorest of the poor are the most deserving in the land and that given the opportunity they can lift themselves out of the mire of poverty. His ideas combine capitalism with social responsibility.
Micro-credit concept is now being practiced in 58 countries. In the US, it is a success even with the Shifting poor of Chicago’s toughest districts. The United States alone has over 500 Grameen spin-offs. Bill Clinton said in his election campaign that Yunus deserved a Nobel Peace Prize and cited the Experiment of Dr. Yunus as a model for rebuilding the inner cities of America. Pilot projects are starting in Britain. The methods are adapted to suit local conditions, but the principle of empowering individuals with their own capital is the same.
Professor Yunus has received honorary doctorate from many Universities in the United States, Canada, England and many other countries. The World Bank has made him the head of advisory committee to propagate his vision worldwide. The countless prizes he has been awarded include The World Food Prize, the highest honor of the Rotary International, “Award for World Understanding” and Care Humanitarian Award. Asia Week magazine called him one of the 25 most influential Asians. New York Times hailed him as the star of the UN’s women’s conference.
The Grameen activity has branched into non-banking activities like venture capital, textile industry, Internet and cellular phone service etc.
Dr. Yunus has set his sights on the total eradication of poverty from the world. World’s leaders are starting to take him seriously.
