Nobel Peace Prize Goes To Founder of Grameen Bank

For thirty years he has been refining the microfinance approach, working incredibly hard every day despite many obstacles. The Grameen Bank that he established now reaches 6.2 million families in Bangladesh alone

It has been a testimony to the power of Microfinance in solving the world's poverty problem. Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank which he founded, one of the World's most successful Microfinance Institiution in Bangladesh, was awareded the 2006 Nobel Peace Price. Yunus has not only made an impact to Bangladesh but for the last 30 Years, he has export his successful model of Microfinance to the world and has actively drive this global movement. He is a hero to anyone who is aspired to contribute something positive to the world. Read on for an extract from Grameen Foundation on his sucess.

"The world is in a barely acknowledged global poverty crisis, one that is at the root of many other crises that grab the headlines every day. More than one billion people are condemned to live on less than US$1 per day. Such a crisis demands tangible, scalable solutions, put into practice on a wide scale. It requires leadership from civil society, and governments. Microfinance is one of the most powerful solutions to poverty in existence today, and Dr. Yunus is the leader most responsible for developing and implementing it in Bangladesh and globally. For thirty years he has been refining the microfinance approach, working incredibly hard every day despite many obstacles. The Grameen Bank that he established now reaches 6.2 million families in Bangladesh alone, and he has established more than twenty other companies, non-profit and for-profit, that attack different dimensions of the poverty problem in a businesslike manner. His story is well told in his memoir, Banker to the Poor, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about how this incredible individual started a worldwide movement.

Dr. Yunus, who was a founding Board member of Grameen Foundation, an organization that I have led since it began in 1997, has the intelligence and entrepreneurial talent to have been a multi-millionaire if he had chosen that course. Instead, he focused on creating millions of “multi-hundredaires” by developing an approach to empowering the poor through loans and other financial services." extract from Grameen Foundation.