Nobel Peace Prize Winner Says Poverty Violates Human Rights
Microloan pioneer Muhammad Yunus: everyone has a right to economic mobility
Watch a video of Muhammad Yunus on BUniverse.
When he first loaned $27 to a small group of poor Bangladeshi womenin 1974, Muhammad Yunus didn’t have an inkling that he was building aworldwide model for lifting struggling people out of poverty.
Butas those kinds of loans increased, Yunus proved the viability ofmicrolending to the poor in developing countries, and Grameen Bank,which he founded in Bangladesh, has gone on to loan some $6 billion tomore than seven million people in his country. Most of those loans havebeen for less than $200, helping small-scale entrepreneurs — 97 percentof them female — build better lives for themselves and their families.
Yunus, who shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize with the Grameen Bank,spoke about his model of economic development on Saturday, October 13.
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