 Dr.
Muhammad Yunus
Chairman,
Grameen Bank
In
1974, Professor Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist
from Chittagong University, led his students on a field
trip to a poor village. They interviewed a woman who
made bamboo stools, and learnt that she had to borrow
the equivalent of 15p to buy raw bamboo for each stool
made. After repaying the middleman, sometimes at rates
as high as 10% a week, she was left with a penny profit
margin. Had she been able to borrow at more advantageous
rates, she would have been able to amass an economic
cushion and raise herself above subsistence level.
Realizing that there must be something terribly wrong
with the economics he was teaching, Yunus took matters
into his own hands, and from his own pocket lent the
equivalent of £ 17 to 42 basket-weavers. He found
that it was possible with this tiny amount not only
to help them survive, but also to create the spark of
personal initiative and enterprise necessary to pull
themselves out of poverty.
Against the advice of banks and government, Yunus carried
on giving out 'micro-loans', and in 1983 formed the
Grameen Bank, meaning 'village bank' founded on principles
of trust and solidarity. In Bangladesh today, Grameen
has 1,084 branches, with 12,500 staff serving 2.1 million
borrowers in 37,000 villages. On any working day Grameen
collects an average of $1.5 million in weekly installments.
Of the borrowers, 94% are women and over 98% of the
loans are paid back, a recovery rate higher than any
other banking system. Grameen methods are applied in
projects in 58 countries, including the US, Canada,
France, The Netherlands and Norway.
Muhammad Yunus is that rare thing: a bona fide visionary.
His dream is the total eradication of poverty from the
world. 'Grameen', he claims, 'is a message of hope,
a programme for putting homelessness and destitution
in a museum so that one day our children will visit
it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible
thing to go on for so long'. This work is a fundamental
rethink on the economic relationship between the rich
and the poor, their rights and their obligations. The
World Bank recently acknowledged that 'this business
approach to the alleviation of poverty has allowed millions
of individuals to work their way out of poverty with
dignity'.
Credit is the last hope left to those faced with absolute
poverty. That is why Muhammad Yunus believes that the
right to credit should be recognized as a fundamental
human right. It is this struggle and the unique and
extraordinary methods he invented to combat human despair
that Muhammad Yunus recounts here with humility and
conviction. It is also the view of a man familiar with
both Eastern and Western cultures - on the failures
and potential for good of industrial countries. It is
an appeal for action: we must concentrate on promoting
the will to survive and the courage to build in the
first and most essential element of the economic cycle
- Man.
Muhammad Yunus was born in 1940 in Chittagong, the business
centre of what was then Eastern Bengal. He was the third
of 14 children of whom five died in infancy. Educated
in Chittagong, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship
and received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, Nashville,
Tennessee. In 1972 he became head of the Economics Department
at Chittagong University. He is the founder and managing
director of the Grameen Bank. In 1997, Professor Yunus
led the world's first Micro Credit Summit in Washington,
DC.
Alan Jolis, co-author of Banker to the Poor, is an American
journalist and writer, now living in Sweden. His books
include Love and Terror, Speak Sunlight (a memoir of
childhood) and several children's novels. He is a contributor
to Vogue, Architectural Digest, the Wall Street Journal,
the International Herald Tribune and other periodicals.
"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.
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