Muhammad Yunus

What if you could harness the power of the free market to solve the problems of poverty, hunger, and inequality? To some, it sounds impossible. But Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus is doing exactly that. As the founder and chairman of Grameen Bank, and the founder of the Yunus Centre, Yunus pioneered microcredit, the innovative banking program that provides the poor — mainly women — with small loans they use to launch businesses and lift their families out of poverty.

Muhammad Yunus’s vision is the total eradication of poverty worldwide. "Grameen," he says, "is a message of hope, a program for putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long." This work represents a fundamental rethink on the economic relationship between the rich and the poor, their rights and their obligations. Yunus's methods have been recognized globally, leading to him receiving more than 112 awards from 26 countries, including state honors from ten countries, and prestigious awards like the Ramon Magsaysay Award and the World Food Prize.

Credit is the last hope left to those faced with absolute poverty. That is why Muhammad Yunus believes that the right to credit should be recognized as a fundamental human right. It is this struggle and the unique and extraordinary methods he invented to combat human despair that Yunus recounts here with humility and conviction. It is also the view of a man familiar with both Eastern and Western cultures — on the failures and potential for good of industrial countries. It is an appeal for action: we must concentrate on promoting the will to survive and the courage to build in the first and most essential element of the economic cycle — Man.