The world was awaken when Professor Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the noble peace prize. The concept of loaning small amounts of money to poor people in Bangladesh, and now in more than one hundred countries worldwide (Muhammad), without a specific date it needed to be paid back by was unheard of in many developed countries around the world. Professor Yunus was able to prove everyone wrong, with the idea of microcredit.
On June 28, 1940 Muhammad Yunus was born, in Chittagong, British India. Chittagong is now known as Bangladesh.
Professor Yunus studied at Dhaka university in Bangladesh, the received a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University. He received his Ph. D. in economics from Vanderbilt in 1969 and the following year became an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University. Returning to Bangladesh, Yunus headed the economics department at Chittagong University (Muhammad).
In the 1970’s Dr. Yunus started to loan money to people in poverty. The plan was to give them small amounts of money, on average one hundred dollars, to help them get on their feet. He gave them the money out of his personal fund until 1983 when he opened the Grameen Bank. With more than seven million borrowers, over ninety-five percent of them are women, the percentage of repayment is amazing (Grameen). The New York Times estimated a ninety-nine percent payback rate.
In the Award Ceremony Speech it was said that Professor Yunus said,
‘For women to be granted the loan has a definite effect on the family. There is no need to do more research on the today. Children benefit automatically, with better clothes and food. We can see the situation changing’. Men often spend the money on themselves; women spend it on the family (The Nobel Peace Prize 2006)
The women that get money from the Grameen bank start their own little “business”. They are able to do things from basket weaving, rope making, vegetable farming, owning livestock, and even chicken farming (Gibbs) (Reuters).
There have been many interviews done with Yunus. This is a phone interview with Adam Smith, who is an Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.
“Is there any particular message you would like to use the opportunity to get across” asked Adam. Professor Yunus answered “The one message that we are trying to promote all the time, that poverty in the world is an artificial creation. It doesn’t belong to human civilization, and we can change that, we can make people come out of poverty and have the real state of affairs. So the only thing that we have to do is to redesign our institutions and policies, and there will be no people who will be suffering from poverty. So I would hope that this award will make this message heard many times, and in a kind of forceful way, so that people start believing that we can create a poverty-free world. That’s what I would like to do (Muhammad Yunus –interview)
Another interview is with Marika Griehsel, a freelance journalist. She asked “What has it to do with peace some people ask?”
. . . Poverty is a threat no matter which way you look at it you can’t leave people poor and leave happily thereafter, the poor people will not let you sleep peacefully because they are in desperate situation. When you are desperate you disturb peace when a country is desperately poor and there is a next door neighbor is very rich, I don’t think, the desperately poor people in this country will just sit there and respect your prosperity and don’t do anything. They will try to get in and use your capacity to help them or to be involved in whatever prosperity you have and you don’t like that, that they’re intrusion into your peaceful life, so that is what must be seen as a threat to the peace otherwise like we talk about terrorism, the breeding ground for terrorism would be object poverty. When you’re poor you can hire anybody for any terrorist activity for little money because he has nothing to lose, he’ll easily be convinces that yes why don’t I do that and the logic of terrorism makes sense to him which will not make sense to a well off family, for example. So there as long as you keep the breeding ground so there is no breeding ground available, and you reduce the chances of disturbing the peace.
Professor Yunus is using the money he got from the Noble Peace prize to better many people in the world, and to help get his word out about microcredit, but it was interesting to find out that the Grameen Bank’s half of the prize is going to be given to Mosammat Taslima, a board member of the bank. She first borrowed money from the Grameen Bank to buy a goat, and then borrowed more money to get three goats. Now she owns land with a mango patch that is her income (Gibbs).
