Raising His Voice to Change the World

By David Bornstein | 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.