Who is this man? I have never heard of him before but it seems he has been busily cracking his head to help the poverty stricken in his homeland - Bangladesh. It was the famine in 1974 which devastated the country that triggered this mans' desire to help the poor and needy. He is an Economics professor who quickly learnt that the book economics he was teaching wasn't helping the poor people in Bangladesh.
He went to the root of the problem by visiting the people most affected by the famine. It was there he found out about the middle men and the money lenders who were squeezing the life out of these people. The loan was given on condition the price for their work would be fixed by the money lenders and the goods must be sold to them only. The were as good as slaves under these terms. They wanted to work and do business but had no capital and the existing financial systems were not helping. The banking system did not consider the poor as good investment and as such refused to give out loans to them. It was then that Yunus decided to give them the loan, as little as $27.00, to start a business that was income-generating to support themselves. Initially he targeted women as they were the most under-priviledged and discriminated against by the banks.
The success of this scheme started the formation of the Grameen Bank in 1976 which lent small sums of money to the poor without collateral thus helping millions of poor families start income-generating projects which made them self supporting. This scheme is called microfinancing and due to its great success in Bangldesh, it has been adopted by the Asian Development Bank to help the poor in other countries. Ashok Sharma, South Asia head of microfinance at the Asian Development Bank in Manila, said that Yunus and his bank threw out all the conventional rules of banking, and succeeded in making people view poverty from a different perspective.
Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank were the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winners. They deserve it. The world needs more people like Yunus who use their knowledge, their talents and their time to help the helpless and the needy.
