Muhammad Yunus is a founder of Grameen Bank and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. He has a dream to create a world where not a single person is poor.
He himself has experimented the idea in many ways. He had taught economics in the university in Bangladesh where he soon found himself in trouble because his theory did not match with the reality. People suffered from poverty, drought and disasters; there was no hope for them to escape from it without help. In fact he helped to improve agricultural productivity through irrigation, but it did not help the poor directly, rather the landowners benefited.
Then he found that a village woman was a victim of a moneylender because she needed cash and the moneylender would give her the money only if she agreed to sell him all she produced at a price he would decide. Dr. Yunus investigated the situation in the village of Jobra and found forty-two victims of the moneylender. Their total debt to the moneylender was less than $27. He paid it from his own pocket and started thinking to let the poor borrow money from a bank. However, the existing banks didn’t lend money to the poor because they believed that the poor were credit-worthy and not able to pay back. Dr. Yunus did not believe that, so in 1983 he founded Grameen (which means “village”) bank to start “Microcredit.”
Dr. Yunus calls Grameen Bank “a social business.” A company is cause-driven rather than profit-driven, with the potential to act as a change agent for the world. A social business is not a charity that relies on subsides and donations. It is a business in every sense. It has to recover its full costs while achieving its social objective. Since Grameen Bank opened, it has given out loans totaling the equivalent of $6 billion. The repayment rate is currently 98.6 percent. It is self-reliant and has not taken donor money since 1995.
Dr. Yunus believes that handouts to the poor encourage dependence rather than self-help and self-confidence. Poverty is not created by poor people, rather it has been created and sustained by the economic and social system that we have designed for ourselves. It is based on assumptions which underestimate human capacity. He firmly believes 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.
To get to know more about Muhammad Yunus and his Social Business: Click here.
Muhammad Yunus is a founder of Grameen Bank and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. He has a dream to create a world where not a single person is poor.
a
He himself has experimented the idea in many ways. He had taught economics in the university in Bangladesh where he soon found himself in trouble because his theory did not match with the reality. People suffered from poverty, drought and disasters; there was no hope for them to escape from it without help. In fact he helped to improve agricultural productivity through irrigation, but it did not help the poor directly, rather the landowners benefited.
a
Then he found that a village woman was a victim of a moneylender because she needed cash and the moneylender would give her the money only if she agreed to sell him all she produced at a price he would decide. Dr. Yunus investigated the situation in the village of Jobra and found forty-two victims of the moneylender. Their total debt to the moneylender was less than $27. He paid it from his own pocket and started thinking to let the poor borrow money from a bank. However, the existing banks didn’t lend money to the poor because they believed that the poor were credit-worthy and not able to pay back. Dr. Yunus did not believe that, so in 1983 he founded Grameen (which means “village”) bank to start “Microcredit.”
a
Dr. Yunus calls Grameen Bank “a social business.” A company is cause-driven rather than profit-driven, with the potential to act as a change agent for the world. A social business is not a charity that relies on subsides and donations. It is a business in every sense. It has to recover its full costs while achieving its social objective. Since Grameen Bank opened, it has given out loans totaling the equivalent of $6 billion. The repayment rate is currently 98.6 percent. It is self-reliant and has not taken donor money since 1995.
a
Dr. Yunus believes that handouts to the poor encourage dependence rather than self-help and self-confidence. Poverty is not created by poor people, rather it has been created and sustained by the economic and social system that we have designed for ourselves. It is based on assumptions which underestimate human capacity. He firmly believes 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.
To get to know more about Muhammad Yunus and his Social Business: Click here.
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land and remembered the place later.
The people here in Karen live with the nature. I helped out Sr. Lidhia to feed little chicks and to get milk from a cow. Maybe the immigation in the United States does not like this for sure. Lambs eat peacefully and dogs lazy. The sound of the sisters’ evening prayer is heavenly.