Geburtsdatum | Freitag, 28. Juni 1940 |
Geburtsort | Bengal_Presidency |
Sternzeichen | |
Beschreibung | Muhammad Yunus (born 28 June 1940) is a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, banker, economist and civil society leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. These loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. Yunus and the Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts through microcredit to create economic and social development from below". The Norwegian Nobel Committee said that "lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty" and that "across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own developm |
My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.
Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women.
I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.
I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in which I was working in Bangladesh.
There is the expression of selfishness and there is the expression of selflessness - but economists or theoreticians never touched that part. They said: 'Go and become a philanthropist.' I said, 'No, I can do that in the business world, create a different kind of business - a business based on selflessness.'
Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.
I said peace is sometimes narrowly interpreted it's the absence of conflict between nations or something. But peace is more inherent, more basic to human life, human beings, what we feel about each other, what we feel about life around us and what we see in our future.
What we are trying to do is to create a social business in Bangladesh, a joint venture to create restaurants for common people. Good, healthy food at affordable prices so that people don't have to opt for food that is unhealthy and unhygienic.
Human beings are much bigger than just making money.
