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President
Obama Honours Dr Yunus 
Muhammad
Yunus, a global leader in anti-poverty efforts, who pioneered the use of
"micro-loans" to provide credit to poor individuals, was one of the
16
recipients who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom award on
August 12 at the White House.
Honoring
the achievements the President noted that the Presidential Medal of
Freedom is America's highest medal awarded to civilians. The President
remarked that the recipients hail from very diverse backgrounds –from
the tennis court to the Supreme Court – but all have been agents of change
in their communities and around the world.
"The
recipients of the Medal of Freedom did not set out to win this or any other
award. They did not set out in pursuit of glory or fame or riches. Rather,
they set out, guided by passion, committed to hard work, aided by persistence,
often with few advantages but the gifts, grace, and good name God gave them.
"So,
let them stand as an example here in the United States—and around the
world—of what we can achieve in our own lives. Let them stand as an example
of the difference we can make in the lives of others. Let each of their
stories stand as an example of a life well lived," he added.
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Dr
Yunus: the Pioneer of Micro-credit Loans
Sam
Daley-Harris
Dr.
Yunus, an economist by training, founded the Grameen Bank in 1983 in his
native Bangladesh to provide small, low-interest loans for self-employed to the poor to help
better their livelihood and communities. Despite its low interest rates
and lending to poor individuals, Grameen Bank is sustainable and 98% percent
of its loans are repaid – higher than other banking systems. It has spread
its successful model throughout the world. Dr. Yunus received the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2006 for his work.
Prof
Yunus is also one of the world’s most effective champions of the ‘yes we
can’ spirit.
Decades
ago, the economics professor and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
described
his search for new bank clients as a process of “looking for the most
timid.”
He wasn’t looking for the villagers who were the first to step forward to
ask for a micro-loan starting at less than $10, he was looking for those who
were last to come forward and who trusted their abilities the least. To those
villagers he and his staff would say, ‘Yes you can.’
Thirty-three years later, nearly eight million members of Grameen Bank (a
total of 40 million when you count their family members) are saying ‘yes we
can’ to the whole world.
Since its inception, Grameen Bank has lent more than $8 billion to the poor in
Bangladesh.
So how does one start an enterprise that reaches nearly 40 million people in
one’s own country and touches
the lives of tens of millions more in
replications around the world? Dr. Yunus had his own ‘yes we can’ moment
as a young economics professor who faced an agonising famine that left him
doubting his value as a teacher and as a human being.
He was so shaken by the sight of people dying of starvation that when he set
foot into Jobra, the village next to his campus, all he wanted to do was to
see if he could be of use to one person for one day — not 40 million —
just one. It was in that village that he met a stool maker who horrified
him when she explained that she earned only two cents a day for her beautiful
craftsmanship. With no money to buy the bamboo she needed, Sufia Khatun was
forced to borrow from a money-lender who
demanded that she sell her
finished stools back to him at a price he set — a price so low that she made
only two cents a day profit.
When he asked whether she could earn more if she was freed from the
moneylender, she told him, ‘Yes I can.’ Professor Yunus had a
student to look for other villagers who were in the same dilemma. The student
found 42 people who needed a grand total of $27 to pay-off the moneylender,
buy their raw materials, and sell their wares to the highest bidder. That’s
right; all they needed was an average of 68 cents each. With her loan of less
than $1 the stool-maker’s profits soared from two cents a day to $1.25 a
day. Now Prof Yunus has set his sights on titans of business and industry with
his social business concept and the chairmen of Dannone, Intel, and BASF are
beating a ‘yes we can’ path to his door to create new non-profit/non-loss
businesses that have as their sole goal improving people’s lives.
The corporations can recover their initial investments in the social
businesses, but after that, all profits are plowed back into these new
companies. They include a joint venture with
Dannone producing
nutritionally fortified yogurt for malnourished villagers, another with BASF
producing chemically treated bed-nets to protect people from mosquitoes
carrying malaria, and still another with Intel bringing
information
technology solutions to rural villages.
When the US President shakes the hand of the Bangladeshi micro-banker at the
White House ceremony this week, Mr Obama will be touching his own past and the
microfinance work his mother did in Indonesia. And when Professor Yunus opens
the Microcredit Summit next April in Nairobi, Kenya, the micro-banker from
Bangladesh will launch the next phase of microfinance in the birthplace of Mr
Obama’s father and throughout the continent.
President Obama should accompany Muhammad Yunus to that Summit in Kenya to
join in the micro-banker’s most inspiring appeal — a daring call to put
poverty in the museums where it belongs.
______________________
Sam
Daley-Harris a
Founder of the Microcredit Summit Campaign which seeks to reach 175 million
poorest families with microcredit.
[Source:
Khaleej Times]
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