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Muhammad Yunus, one of the most famous economists and bankers in the world, holds the Nobel Peace Prize. He was born in 1940. He has experience in combating poverty in his country, as he succeeded in creating and establishing the Grameen Bank (the Bank of the Poor), which aims to reduce poverty by providing... Small loans to the poor without guarantees. He left the presidency of the bank in 2011 at the request of the Central Bank because he had exceeded the retirement age (60 years).
Birth and upbringing
Muhammad Yunus was born on June 28, 1940, in Bathwa, one of the villages of the city of Chittagong located southeast of the state of East Bengal, which became part of Pakistan in 1955 and then became Bangladesh in 1971. At that time, Chittagong was considered a commercial center for the East Bengal region, north of Eastern India at that time.
He is the third of 9 brothers in a Muslim family. His father worked as a jeweler in the city, which provided him with a better environment than his peers at the time, in light of the good living situation that made his father insist on giving him and his siblings a high-quality education.
However, the greatest influence on Yunus’s life was his mother, Safia Khatun, as he considered her his role model. She taught him how to have a mission in life, especially when he saw from her that she did not hesitate to help any poor person who knocked on their door.
He spent his early childhood in his village until 1944, after which he moved with his family to Chittagong, where his mother died in 1949.
Muhammad Yunus ranked 16th out of 39,000 students in East Pakistan in high school (Associated Press)
Educational and cultural training
He received his primary education at Lamabazar Primary School, and completed his secondary education at Chittagong School;
He was ranked 16th out of 39,000 students in East Pakistan in high school.
During his school years, he was involved in scouting, and traveled to West Pakistan and India in 1952, and to Canada in 1955 to attend festivals.
In 1957, he joined the University of Dhaka to study economics, from which he graduated in 1961. He was appointed lecturer in economics at Chittagong College in 1961, and during this period he established a packaging factory.
In 1965, he received a scholarship from the Fulbright Foundation to study for a doctorate at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
Meanwhile, the war to liberate Bangladesh (East Pakistan) broke out, which was fighting for independence from West Pakistan. Naturally, Yunus took a position in support of his country and established a student committee and movement demanding independence.
He returned to Bangladesh in 1972, and was appointed to the government's Planning Committee, but he found it a boring job, so he resigned to join the University of Chittagong, as head of the Department of Economics. His country was exposed to a severe famine in 1974, which caused the death of one and a half million Bangladeshis.
As a result of the famine that the country experienced, Yunus decided to do something to help the poor (social networking sites)
These events caused a major shock in his professional and academic life, as he saw that he had to do something to help the poor in his country, and not keep his knowledge and economic theories confined within the walls of the university.
He believed that poverty deprives its owner of every noble human value, and therefore providing loans, even very small ones, is considered a human right and an effective means of confronting poverty and getting out of its circle.
He then tried to persuade the Central Bank or commercial banks to establish a system for lending to the poor without guarantees, which prompted bankers to ridicule him and his ideas, claiming that the poor were not qualified to lend.
Social experiment
In 1976, when he went on a tour to visit the poorest families, in the vicinity of the villages adjacent to the University of Chittagong, he discovered that very small loans could make a difference to these poor people, especially when he found that a group of women were making furniture from bamboo, relying on loans to buy raw materials. This affected their profits.
Traditional banks at that time provided small loans with reasonable interest due to the high borrowing risks on the banks themselves, which was completely contradictory to Yunus’s idea, which was based on the necessity of providing loans to the poor in return for a long repayment period, until he began his idea by lending 42 village women $27.
In December 1976, Yunus succeeded in obtaining a loan from the government through the Janata Bank to lend to the poor in the village of Jurba, and the institution continued to work, securing loans from other banks for its projects, as the number of borrowers reached 28 thousand by 1982, and from here the thinking began. In an integrated pilot project to establish Grameen Bank (Village Bank).
Grameen Bank experience
As the idea fermented and headed towards taking on an institutional character, Younis and his colleagues faced a harsh campaign on the part of some radical and leftist movements, which basically fought the idea of borrowing from the bank, but all of that did not affect his idea and the path to its implementation.
On October 1, 1983, Yunus succeeded in transforming the pilot project in the village of Jobra in Chattogram Province, Bangladesh, into a bank he called Grameen Bank. He restructured the bank and transformed it into an independent institution, whose primary goal was to alleviate poverty and empower the marginalized poor in Bangladesh. From small loans.
The advantage of the bank's activities is that it does not require guarantees to obtain a loan, and all banking transactions except the disbursement of loans take place at borrowers' meetings in centers at the village level.
One of the bank's priorities was to empower women and involve them in economic activities. About 98% of the borrowers were women, and these loans affected their lives and improved their living conditions.
Muhammad Yunus during the opening of his bank in 1983 (social networking sites)
Figures and Statistics
According to the bank's website, it has opened its branches in 40 regions, has 40 audit offices, and 2,568 branch offices, and the number of its employees as of January 2024 is about 22,000 employees.
A set of statistics were also mentioned on the bank’s official website, including:
In 2017, the number of its branches reached more than 2,600 branches in various regions of Bangladesh, and the number of borrowers reached more than 9 million, with very high recovery rates ranging from 97% to 99.6%.
The bank is active in 94% of Bangladesh's villages, and its activities cover 81,678 villages in the country, providing services to about 45 million people.
The bank's loans are not only related to economic activities, but it also provides educational loans, new loans for entrepreneurship, and scholarships for the children of borrowing members.
The “Begging Members” program is one of the most humanitarian and exceptional programs that the bank offers to its customers, as it provides interest-free loans to help beggars build their financial capabilities, so that they do not have to beg again, and the bank has succeeded in helping more than 21,000 people to stop begging. They became self-sufficient.
Muhammad Yunus received 50 honorary doctorates from various universities (French)
The bank also provides natural disaster lending services and family lending services, and by 2005 the total loans granted by the bank over the course of its work amounted to about $4.8 billion, and it rose to $7.6 billion in 2008.
In line with projects to confront climate change, the bank implemented a new tree planting program, and succeeded in planting more than 206 million trees until September 2023.
As of January 2024, the cumulative amount of the bank’s loans since its establishment amounted to 37,997,997 US dollars, and 10.50 million borrower members benefited from them, 97% of whom were women.
Activities and programs
The bank's activities and branches expanded not only within Bangladesh, but also extended to provide its services and activities in many countries, including (Malaysia, the Philippines, Nepal, India, and Vietnam). Its activities also extended to reach rich countries, including the United States, as there are 19 bank branches in 11 countries. state, and provided its services to about 100,000 women and poor Americans in the same way as their peers in Bangladesh.
The Bank's Grameen Foundation was established in 1997 and has formed a global network that includes 52 partners in 22 countries, providing assistance to about 11 million people in Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Middle East.
In the late 1980s, the bank began to diversify its activities through fishing basin projects and irrigation pumps such as deep tube wells, and in 1989 these diversified activities prompted the bank’s directors to think about establishing independent economic institutions.
The bank now has profit-making and non-profit institutions and companies affiliated with it, including the Grameen Fisheries Foundation, the Grameen Agricultural Foundation, the Grameen Trust, and the Grameen Fund, as well as Grameen Telecom, which owns a share in Grameen Phone and is considered the largest company. For private phone in bangladesh.
Jobs and responsibilities
1961 After graduating from Dhaka University, he joined the government's Economic Planning Commission.
He was appointed Professor and Lecturer of Economics at Chittagong College after his resignation from the State Economic Planning Commission.
1969-1972 He worked as an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University.
1976 He launched his initiative to establish and launch his experimental project “Grameen” to confront poverty in his country.
In the period (1983-2011) he was the head of the Grameen Bank until the Central Bank forced him to leave it because he had exceeded the mandatory retirement age (60 years).
Awards and achievements
He received international and local awards, medals and honorary doctorates, amounting to 50 doctoral degrees, from universities in 20 countries, in addition to 113 international awards from 26 different countries, including medals of honor from 10 countries. Among the most prominent of these awards are:
Magsaysay Ramon Award in 1984.
The most prestigious Independence Day Award in Bangladesh (1987).
World Food Prize and Simón Bolívar International Prize (1994).
Prince of Asturias Concord Award and Sydney Peace Prize in 1998.
Gandhi Peace Prize in 2000.
King Hussein Humanitarian Award (Jordan, 2000).
Seoul Peace Prize in 2006.
Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, shared with Grameen Bank.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom and the US Congressional Gold Medal in 2009, honored by former US President Barack Obama.
Former US President Barack Obama awards Muhammad Yunus with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 (French)
Books and publications
Younes wrote a group of books and co-authored another group with authors and experts, including:
The book The World of the Three Zeros:
In which he presents a detailed explanation of his idea of the “three zeros”, in which he explains his vision for achieving full development and combating poverty at a zero rate (unemployment, poverty, carbon emissions), especially since he sees a major failure and clear problems in the structure of capitalism, after its failure to achieve Social justice and its destruction of the environment, causing widespread unemployment and exacerbating class problems.
The Bank of the Poor - Microcredit and the Battle Against Poverty in the World:
In it, he reviews his experience with the idea of the Bank of the Poor, how it began and how it became a reality. The book also includes his vision of a number of economic issues, especially those related to real indicators of development in national income, and his opinion on the socialist and capitalist systems. The advantages and disadvantages of each, and the role of micro-enterprises in local development.
Building Social Business - The New Kind of Capitalism:
The author shows how entrepreneurship and business intelligence can be harnessed to create sustainable businesses that can solve the world's biggest problems, and also shows how social business can be put into practice to achieve development success.
About non-profit organizations and social sectors:
A book that includes 10 articles, by a number of experts, including Muhammad Yunus, in which they discuss how non-profit organizations and social sectors obtain an increasing share of the most vital work in the world, and are these institutions ready for this challenge or not?
How can we help them achieve the immediate impact and lasting change required?
A journey to the people who change the world - and what we can learn from them:
A book co-authored by Dr. Muhammad Yunus, along with other inspiring people who have experiences that have influenced and changed the reality of their societies. The book tells diverse and inspiring stories of people from all over the world who have left a sustainable mark on the world. Throughout their careers, the book offers a toolkit on how to create a career that has a positive impact on the world.
Muhammad Yunus wrote a collection of different books in the world of economics and social service (Reuters)
In addition to the above, Dr. Muhammad Yunus wrote and co-wrote a number of other books, including:
A world free of poverty.
Plant response to air pollution.
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Fibromyalgia.
Source: websites