Winner of Noble Peace Prize for 2006, Muhammad Yunus was trained in economics in the United States, he returned to Bangladesh in 1972 and took a chair in economics at the University of Chittagong. In 1974 he underwent a personal crisis during the country's famine. It shook him to see such poverty. And he asked himself, "What is the point of all these splendid economic theories when people around me are dying of hunger?" As early as in 1976, he hit on the idea of opening a bank for poor people. He lent 27 dollars out of his own pocket to 42 craftsmen in a little village in Bangladesh, telling them that they could pay the money back when they could afford to. In the weeks that followed, he gave the matter a great deal of thought, and decided that there would have to be an institutional solution.
The result was Grameen Bank, which is present today in the vast majority of Bangladesh's thousands of villages, and which since its formal opening in 1983 has lent almost six billion dollars. Today the bank has almost seven million borrowers. Grameen Bank lends 800 million dollars per year, in loans averaging just over one hundred dollars. The bank is self-financing and makes a profit. The repayment percentage is very high. Muhammad Yunus says, "Lend the poor money in amounts which suit them, teach them a few sound financial principles, and they manage on their own".
In the book Banker to the poor. The story of the Grameen Bank, Yunus asks whether it is really possible to imagine a world without poverty. His own answer is as follows: "We have created a slavery-free world, a polio-free world, an apartheid-free world. Creating a poverty-free world would be greater than all these accomplishments while at the same time reinforcing them. This would be a world that we could all be proud to live in".
In 2002, Bill Clinton put it this way: "Dr. Yunus is a man who long ago should have won the Nobel Prize and I'll keep saying that until they finally give it to him."
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