Nobel Prize Winner Speaks to Lancaster Chamber

Chris Torres
Staff Writer

LANCASTER, Pa. — Muhammad Yunus has made a life of challenging the status quo in his native Bangladesh.

On Wednesday, he challenged members of Lancaster County's business and agricultural community to do the same with his message of social prosperity over individual success.

Nearly 2,500 people came to the Lancaster County Chamber of Commerce and Industry dinner to hear Yunus speak.

Yunus, a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, spent a little over an hour talking about his experiences lifting poor people out of poverty in his native country.

He is considered the pioneer of micro-credit lending — giving small loans out to the poor who wouldn't normally quality for traditional bank loans.

Back in the early 1970s, Yunus returned to Bangladesh when it gained independence from Pakistan. Before that, he spent a number of years teaching economics at Middle Tennessee State University.

Most people in Bangladesh work in agriculture and live off of a few staple crops.

He quickly got a dose of reality when his home country fell into widespread famine, killing millions and leaving many others malnourished.

"It's not a very pleasant experience to see hunger, famine and death," he said.

Yunus said he went into a period of reflection and introspection as he longed to help some of the country's poorest people get out of the grips of poverty.

While traveling through the villages, he noticed many bank lender operations.
It seemed strange to him that in a country where most of the people live in poverty, banks were thriving. So he investigated a little further and found many of the poorest people were in debt.

With $27, he got a group of 42 people out of debt and came up with an idea of lending small amounts of money to the poorest people, without the requirement of collateral and minimum payments.

"The idea was, if you can make so many people so happy with so little, why not do more of it?" he said.

With little cooperation coming from local banks, he started his own bank in 1983, Grameen Bank, which gives out loans to the poorest of people and provides flexible payment plans and interest rates. The idea is to make credit available to enable poor people to sustain themselves and their businesses, without making it impossible for them to pay the money back.

The program largely targets women, who in his native country mostly support their families on a personal and emotional basis but have not historically been the bread winners.

"Seeing all these positive things about women, we changed our view," he said. "We wanted to concentrate on women."

Since starting the bank, 98 percent of the loans have been repaid and more than 90 percent of its customers have been women.

Along with the bank, he has started scholarship programs and "social businesses," which he said don't work on a profit, but rather operate on the premise of benefiting whole communities.

Yunus has been widely praised throughout the world for his work with poor people. His idea of micro-credit has expanded to other countries including the U.S., with the opening of a Grameen Bank branch in New York City.

Yunus said he felt good to be in Lancaster County and praised the many businesses and the agriculture community for its prosperity.

But he challenged people to think of themselves as part of a whole community and to lift the struggling with the goal of benefiting all.

"Lifting the bottom is prosperity. We stand tall as a community. That's what prosperity means."

url: http://www.lancasterfarming.com/node/1229