Muhammad Yunus / b. 1940 / village near Chittagong, Bangladesh (then the British Raj) / Economist, Banker, Social Entrepreneur, Founder of Grameen Bank
COVID-19
What happens to the rest of the world? It’s as if the rest of the world will be forgotten. . . . This is a vaccine that is needed by 8 billion people. What happens to poor people? What happens to poor countries who cannot afford to pay the prices that they’ll be charging in the rich countries? With social business, shareholders don’t want to make any profit out of it so no dividend is taken from the company and we can reduce the cost and produce anywhere.
Reported by Darnell Christie in “Nobel winners call for coronavirus vaccines to be available for all,” Thomson Reuters Foundation, London, June 29, 2020.
I believe that, ultimately, the only way to definitively eradicate the pandemic is to have a vaccine that can be administered to all inhabitants of the planet. . . . The effectiveness of the upcoming vaccination campaign will depend on its universality. To ensure the availability of the vaccines to all people on the planet almost at the same time, it has to be free from ownership. To do so we intend to make a global pharmaceutical social business operational as soon as possible. I am looking for partners to help us achieve this goal. . . . It has to be freed from commercial interest. The polio vaccine was declared as a common good, not owned by anybody. Why not (have) the corona vaccine follow the same path?
Reported by Shehab Sumon in “Bangladeshi Nobel laureate says COVID-19 vaccine must be free from commercial interests,” arabnews.com, July 4, 2020.
Governance
I believe that “government,” as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement and justice, national defense and foreign policy, and let the private sector, a “Grameenized private sector,” a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
Another way to achieve [develppment] is to let a business earn profit that is then taxed by the government, and the tax can be used to provide services to the poor. But in practice it never works that way. In real life, taxes only pay for a government bureaucracy that collects the tax and provides little or nothing to the poor. And since most government bureaucracies are not profit motivated, they have little incentive to increase their efficiency. In fact, they have a disincentive: governments often cannot cut social services without a public outcry, so the behemoth continues, blind and inefficient, year after year.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
The challenge I set before anyone who condemns private-sector business is this: If you are a socially conscious person, why don’t you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
When you can hold the world in your palm and see it from a bird’s eye view, you tend to become arrogant—you do not realize that when looking from such a great distance, everything becomes blurred, and that you end up imagining rather than really seeing things.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
Grameen Bank
Poor people always pay back their loans. It’s us, the creators of institutions and rules, who keep creating trouble for them.
Reported by Asif Dowla and Dipal Barua in The Poor Always Pay Back: The Grameen II Story (2006).
I will not spend the money for myself. I will rather spend it in special business on a no-profit-no-loss policy. We will also establish an eye hospital where even beggars will be given treatment at the cost of Taka 10-20. (Note: the Taka is the Bangladeshi currency.)
Reported in The Daily Star (Dhaka), October 14, 2006.
I did something that challenged the banking world. Conventional banks look for the rich; we look for the absolutely poor. All people are entrepreneurs, but many don’t have the opportunity to find that out.
Reported in The Guardian, UK, 2010.
Grameen is a private-sector self-help bank, and as its members gain personal wealth they acquire water-pumps, latrines, housing, education, access to health care, and so on.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
I profoundly believer, as Grammen’s experience over twenty years has shown, that personal gains is not the only possible fuel for free enterprise. Social goals can replace greed as a powerful motivational force. Social-consciousness-driven enterprises can be formidable competitors for the greed-based enterprises. I believe that if we play our cards right, social-consciousness-driven enterprises can do very well in the marketplace.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
International Aid
When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
I learned that things are never as complicated as we imagine them to be. It is only our arrogance which seeks to find complicated answers to simple problems.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
The direct elimination of poverty should be the objective of all development aid. Development should be viewed as a human rights issue, not as a question of simply increasing the gross national product (GNP).
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
Population Growth
I believe that the emphasis on curbing population growth diverts attention from the more vital issue of pursuing policies that allow the population to take care of itself.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
UN studies conducted in more than forty developing countries show that the birth rate falls as women gain equality. . . . I believe income-earning opportunities that empower poor women . . . will have more impact on curbing population growth that the current system of “encouraging” family planning practices through intimidation tactics.. Family planning should be left to the family.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
Power
Financial power is not the only power in the world. There is also the power of ideas, of nonviolence, of democracy, of respect, of love. These true powers can be used against the power of guns and bombs.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
Women
If you are born into a poor family, if you are a woman you have seen the worst of poverty. In a cultural way in the families in Bangladesh it’s the women who eats last. So if you have a scarcity in the family … she misses out so everything comes in the raw deal for her. So , given a chance she works very hard to make a change to improve her life. And by training she is the most efficient manager of scarce resources. Because with the little resource she has, she has to stretch it as much as she can to look after the children, look after the family and everything else . . . unlike men—men want to enjoy right away. Whatever he got, whatever tiny bit of thing he got he doesn’t care for much what’s coming up.
Interview with Australian Broadcasting Corporation, March 25, 1997.
When a destitute mother starts earning an income, her dreams of success invariably center around her children. A woman’s second priority is the household. She wants to buy utensils, build a stronger roof, or find a bed for herself and her family. A man has an entirely different set of priorities. When a destitute father earns extra income, he focuses more attention on himself. Thus money entering a household through a woman brings more benefits to the family as a whole.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
World Poverty
Once poverty is gone, we’ll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They’ll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society—how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.
Muhammad Yunus, Creating a World without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism (2008
People . . . were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institution in the country did not help them widen their economic base.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty.
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999).
To me poor people are like bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a flower-pot, you get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted, only the soil-base that is too inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong in their seeds. Simply, society never gave them the base to grow on. All it needs to get the poor people out of poverty for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly.
Muhammad Yunus, Creating a World without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism (2008).
The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world—all we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them.
Muhammad Yunus, “Eliminating Poverty Through Market-Based Social Entrepreneurship,” Global Urban Development Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 1, May, 2005; accessible at globalurban.org.
Poverty has been created by the economic and social system that we have designed for the world. It is the institutions that we have built, and feel so proud of, which created poverty.
Muhammad Yunus, “Eliminating Poverty Through Market-Based Social Entrepreneurship,” Global Urban Development Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 1, May, 2005; accessible at globalurban.org.
All human beings have an innate skill—survival skill. The fact that poor are still alive is a proof of their ability to survive. We do not need to teach them how to survive. They know this already.
Reported in “Profile of Yunus,” North American Bangladesh Info Center.