{"id":51804,"date":"2018-04-26T09:28:38","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T07:28:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/premium-speakers.com\/speaker\/muhammad-yunus-en\/"},"modified":"2018-04-26T09:28:38","modified_gmt":"2018-04-26T07:28:38","slug":"muhammad-yunus","status":"publish","type":"speaker","link":"https:\/\/premium-speakers.com\/en\/speaker-presenter\/muhammad-yunus\/","title":{"rendered":"Muhammad Yunus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, Professor Muhammad Yunus is internationally recognized for his work in poverty alleviation and the empowerment of poor women.<\/p>\n

Imagine a bank that loans money based on a borrower\u00b4s desperate circumstances — where, as Muhammad Yunus says, ‘the less you have, the higher priority you have.’ Turning banking convention on its head has accomplished a world of good for millions of impoverished Bangladeshis, as the pioneering economist Yunus has demonstrated in the last three decades. What began as a modest academic experiment has become a personal crusade to end poverty. Yunus reminds us that for two-thirds of the world\u00b4s population ‘financial institutions do not exist.’ Yet, we\u00b4ve created a world which goes around with money. If you don\u00b4t have the first dollar, you can\u00b4t catch the next dollar. It was Yunus\u00b4 notion, in the face of harsh skepticism, to give the poorest of the poor their first dollar so they could become self-supporting. ‘We\u00b4re not talking about people who don\u00b4t know what to do with their lives. They\u00b4re as good, enterprising, as smart as anybody else.’<\/p>\n

His Grameen Bank spread from village to village as a lender of tiny amounts of money (microcredit), primarily to women. Yunus heard that ‘all women can do is raise chickens, or cows or make baskets.’ He said, ‘Don\u00b4t underestimate the talent of human beings’ No collateral is required, nor paperwork\u201a just an effort to make good and pay back the loan. Now the bank boasts 5 million borrowers, receiving half a billion dollars a year. It has branched out into student loans, health care coverage, and into other countries. Grameen has even created a mobile phone company to bring cell phones to Bangladeshi villages. Yunus envisions microcredit building a society where even poor people can open ‘the gift they have inside of them.’<\/p>\n

Summary Biography<\/h2>\n

Professor Yunus has successfully melded capitalism with social responsibility to create the Grameen Bank, a microcredit institution committed to providing small amounts of working capital to the poor for self-employment.<\/p>\n

From its origins as an action-research project in 1976, Grameen Bank has grown to provide collateral-free loans to 5 million clients in Bangladesh, 96% of who are women. Over the last two decades, Grameen Bank has loaned out over 5 billion dollars to the poorest of the poor, while maintaining a repayment rate consistently above 98%. The innovative approach to poverty alleviation pioneered by Professor Yunus in a small village in Bangladesh has inspired a global microcredit movement reaching out to millions of poor women from rural South Africa to inner city Chicago.<\/p>\n

His autobiography, ‘Banker to the Poor: Microlending and the Battle Against World Poverty,’ has been translated in French, Italian, Spanish, English, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, Gujarati, Chinese, German, Turkish and Arabic.<\/p>\n

In 1957, he enrolled in the department of economics at Dhaka University and completed his BA in 1960 and MA in 1961. Following his graduation, Yunus joined the Bureau of Economics as research assistant. Later he was appointed as a lecturer in economics in Chittagong College in 1961. He was offered a Fulbright scholarship in 1965 to study in the USA. He obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Vanderbilt University in 1969.<\/p>\n

Besids Grameen Bank he has created a number of companies in Bangladesh to address diverse issues of poverty and development. Among the companies are:<\/h2>\n