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Muhammad Yunus with entrepreneur & her business project

A Bangladeshi banker, professor of economics, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus is famous for his successful application of micro credit. Against the advice of banks and government, Yunus began giving out  'micro-loans' to the poor, and in 1983 formed the Grameen Bank, meaning 'village bank', founded on principles of trust and solidarity. These loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. Grameen methods are applied in projects in 58 countries, including the US, Canada, France, The Netherlands and Norway. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton was a vocal advocate for awarding the Nobel Prize to Muhammed Yunus. In 2007, Business Week magazine named Dr. Yunus as one of “The Greatest Entrepreneurs of All Time.”

“What is entrepreneurship, after all?  Bigness is not the issue.  Poor people are the ones who take challenges every day. The guy who sells a hot dog on the street is as much an entrepreneur as anyone else. Getting his $50 loan to start could be as difficult as finding $50 million for someone else. All people are entrepreneurs.”

“Poverty is unnecessary.”

“Each of us has much more hidden inside us than we have had a chance to explore. Unless we create an environment that enables us to discover the limits of our potential, we will never know what we have inside of us.”

“I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.”

“This is not charity. This is business: business with a social objective, which is to help people get out of poverty.”

“I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation.”

“My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.”

                       

“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.”

“Poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone.”

“People can change their own lives, provided they have the right kind of institutional support. They’re not asking for charity, charity is no solution to poverty. Poverty is the creation of opportunities like everybody else has, not the poor people, so bring them to the poor people, so that they can change their lives.”

“In the world of development, if one mixes the poor and the non-poor in a program, the non-poor will always drive out the poor, and the less poor will drive out the more poor, unless protective measures are instituted right at the beginning.  In such cases, the non-poor reap the benefits of all that is done in the name of the poor.”

“I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.”

“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.”

“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.”

Muhammad Yunus  -  Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

“My experience working in the Grameen Bank has given me faith; an unshakable faith in the creativity of human beings. It leads me to believe that humans are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty. They suffer now as they did in the past because we turn our heads away from this issue.”

“I did something that challenged the banking world. Conventional banks look for the rich; we look for the absolutely poor. All people are entrepreneurs, but many don’t have the opportunity to find that out.”

“Each individual person is very important. Each person has tremendous potential. She or he alone can influence the lives of others within the communities, nations, within and beyond her or his own time.”

“I have come to believe, deeply and firmly, that we can create a poverty free world if we want to. I came to this conclusion not as a product of a pious dream, but as a concrete result of experience gained in the work of the Grameen Bank.”

“If I could be useful to another human being, even for a day, that would be a great thing. It would be greater than all the big thoughts I could have at the university.”

- Muhammad Yunus  (1940-)

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