Raising His Voice to Change the World
By David Bornstein How to Change the World | October 17, 2006
The Nobel Prize Committee's decision to award its 2006 Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank should give encouragement to millions of people around the world working to eradicate hard core poverty. For Yunus, it is a step forward toward creating a world in which, as he says, “our great grandchildren will have to go to museums to see what poverty was.”
It was in 1965, after Yunus had built up a successful packaging business in Bangladesh and was on his way to becoming a rich man, that he decided to switch to economics and accept a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, under Nicholai Georgescu-Roegen. There, during the civil rights era, he witnessed students standing up to authority, protesting the Vietnam War and segregation – and he saw how important it was for young people to raise their voices to change the world. He was attracted to the “counterculture” ethic, an idea that later guided his thinking in the creation of the Grameen Bank. In 1972, when he returned to Bangladesh after its independence, in the wake of a war in which more than a million Bangladeshis were killed, he resolved to help rebuild his country. With his graduate students at Chittagong University, Yunus began experimenting with development approaches in a village called Jobra near his campus. Initially, they focused on health and farming schemes
They created a Green Revolution type program called the “New Era Three Share Farm” – but it was the credit project initially named the “Jobra Landless Association” that really caught Yunus's imagination because of the dramatic impact he saw small loans had on the lives of the poor. “It seemed amazing that something so little could change someone's life for the better,” he said. How could he live in a society that would not extend tiny amounts of credit to poor people who needed the money for survival activities? The work started out of a thatch-roof hut in the center of the village. The first paid employee was Priti Rani Barua, a local Buddhist woman who was hired to go around the village persuading Muslim women to take loans and improve their lives. It was a job that gave her great joy and peace of mind, she once told me. She felt deeply blessed that the Grameen Bank had come into her life. So have many others.
October 17, 2006 |Tags: microcredit, Nobel Prize, Yunus | TrackBack
Posted by: segun odegbami on November 10, 2006 at 4:27 PM
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I have been living in the world of limitless possibilities since reading the story of Yunus Mohammad and knowing more about the work of the UN and some individuals around the world.
I share in Yunus's dream to make a contribution to the UN's effort to eradicate hunger and poverty in the world by 2015.
My people in Wasimi Orile, a little village in Ogun State, Nigeria, one of 33 villages (14 of them are now extinct) in the environment, ravaged by poverty and disease, through neglect, illiteracy and ignorance, is (in 21st century Nigeria, one of the rich developing countries in the world)without proper road access, no pipeborne water (a nearby stream provides the only source of all its water needs), no electricity, no school, no toilet facilities and no hospital. This same village is blessed with over 1200 hectares of fertile land (perfect for upland rice and cassava) but is abandoned by the youths for lack of basic facilities for jobs and employment in the Cities. This village and indeed, Nigeria, have no business being amongst the poor, hungry and disease-laden countries of the world.
In the absence of a visible intervention by government this poses a challenge to our community. Our mission? In five years Wasimi Orile will sprout anew from the ground and become a modern rural community of successful people, a model of rural development, and an example to other villages and communities not only in Nigeria but also amongst impoverished peoples and communities in the world. Wasimi will become one less amongst the communities of the world classified by the UN presently as hungry, poor, sick and illiterate in the world.
Wasimi' Orile's future developemnt is achored to the establishment of a unique school project called The International Sports Academy through self-help in the village.
This school of excellence for children gifted in sports and the arts for poor children will necessitate and accelerate the provision of basic infrastruture in the area. It will train a new generation of young boys and girls to become leaders and successful future role models through the full development of their talents. It will vigorously pursue the revival of agriculture, establishment of cottage-industries through utilisation of the Yunus Mohammad's micro-finance scheme, generation of employment and self-employment opportunities, and establishment of a new, modern but rural self-sustaining community in the process.
I thank Mohammad Yunus, Ted Turner, Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Bono, Dan Doyle, Billy Lee Long, Kofi Anan, and a host of persons and organisations around the world that are playing their part in this global cause, and who continue to inspire us not to give up on the world but to heal her. I thank them all for making us believe that with every individual making their little contribution little drops will soon become an ocean of developemnt that will change the world, eradicate poverty and hunger, and usher in Global Peace.
Watch out for the story of Wasimi Orile along the circuit of similar projects around the world. We have embaeked on our journey already.
Segun Odegbami.
You may wish to google-search my name to know more about me and that this is authentic.