Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunusis a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, banker, economist, and civil society leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. These loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. In 2006, Yunus and the Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts through microcredit to create economic and social development from below". The Norwegian Nobel Committee said that "lasting...
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth28 June 1940
CityChittagong, Bangladesh
I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in which I was working in Bangladesh.
They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.
I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.
Human beings are much bigger than just making money.
What we are trying to do is to create a social business in Bangladesh, a joint venture to create restaurants for common people. Good, healthy food at affordable prices so that people don't have to opt for food that is unhealthy and unhygienic.
Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in.
Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.
Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business.
Truly affordable but high-quality health care tools and services are the only means by which quality health care can be provided to all.
All human beings are very creative - full of potential, full of energy... So, money kind of allows them to express it... And if you're successful, you can take more money. You can expand your capacity, reach next level of capacity, and so on.
Business is a very beautiful mechanism to solve problems, but we never use it for that purpose. We only use it to make money. It satisfies our selfish interest but not our collective interest.
I dismiss personal profit and focus exclusively on people and planet. That's what I call social business: a nondividend company dedicated to solving human problems. You can go all the way, forgetting about personal profit, being single-minded about solving problems. The company makes profit, but profit stays with the company.
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.
By simply capitalizing on core strengths and knowledge, companies and entrepreneurs can engage in an emerging business model that will enable them to create - and demonstrate - real, sustainable social impact in society.