Interview: “Obama is a son of microcredit”

• Miscellaneous
• 26th January 2009
• YC

Interview  When he was a child Barack watched his parent committed to freeing the world from poverty.

The Nobel Yunus: “Obama is a son of microcredit”
The “banker to the poor” tells of the same engagement made by the Us president’s mother “I don’t know whether Obama will be able to live up to great expectations.But I know that Obama has already won the most important challenge”.Which is?«

He has managed to create a new sense of trust that things can change: the world can be changed».

When Muhammad Yunus says this, it carries a lot of weight considering that for him trust is the mainstay of “his” microcredit. The Bangladesh economist and Nobel peace prize winner dubbed the “banker to the poor” Yunus knows very well how this belief in change can spark revolutions and free up unexpected resources and potential. It was more than 30 years ago — in 1976 — when he created  the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the first bank in the world to give loans to the destitute on the basis of trust rather than solvency guarantees or security. “In Bangladesh, where nothing works, microcredit works like a Swiss watch” Yunus frequently states. His bestselling book “The banker to the poor” is about this virtuous system which, unlike charity donations, can help even beggars to become entrepreneurs. Obama managed to overcome political apartheid; you are working to overcome its financial equivalent. Now that Obama is in the White House is “your” vision of a world without poverty that much nearer to becoming a reality? “He is not just the first black president; hopefully he will be a great president too. It’s not because he is black that he became important and

why people are looking forward to him. People expect so much from him because he is talking about things, he’s promising things that everybody feels strongly  within them. So after eight years of total frustration and seeing the world falling apart and seeing it derailed from its right direction, Obama has become a symbol of hope that the world can be put back on its tracks and can go in the right direction, thus making a different world for the new millennium. After all we are not talking only about the next four years of Obama’s leadership: Obama presented himself and convinced the world that he is the one who has the ambition to set the world in the context of the new millennium. Not only has he convinced the voters of the United States, he has convinced the world in general. That’s why the whole world is excited about his getting into the White House. He’s setting the direction for the whole century, to create a new century for us, a new millennium for us”.

Yes, but can Obama help to build a world without poverty? “I don’ know if he will be able to, but he’s promising it and he has created an aura of trust, that says “Yes, I’m a trustworthy guy”, that’s the most exciting part of it, not everything can be delivered as he envisioned – but if he can set the direction for all the nations of the world that would be a great success. You don’t do it overnight: four years in the history of the world is a very short time, but he has promised ‘I can understand what you feel in your heart. I feel the same  way and I can
get you in the right direction’. That’s the most exciting thing. Anyway, my way towards a world without poverty is not unfamiliar to him. His mother was involved in microcredit: that’s what she was doing in Indonesia – and the young Obama was with her, watching his mother doing microcredit. So microcredit is not a new subject for him. This is a very strong imprint
on the mind of Obama and now he has someone in his cabinet in a very influential position –  Hillary Clinton – who is also devoted to microcredit. Hillary promoted microcredit programmes when she was the governor’s wife in Arkansas, so it’s not something she learnt from books
but rather she learnt it as a practitioner”. Have you ever met Obama’s mother? «We were supposed to meet at the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in September 1995. She was scheduled to make a speech to show how much good could be done by lending small amounts of money to poor women; how reliable they were in paying off the debt and how they used the money to make their families feel better. But Ann Dunham was seriously ill and was immobilized at home, in Hawaii, suffering from cancer. She died two months after the Beijing Summit. Her group decided to involve Hillary Clinton, then first lady. It wasn’t hard to persuade her as she had already promoted one of my projects when she was the wife of the governor in Arkansas. It was she who spoke in Beijing with great articulation about the importance of microcredit in changing women’s lives. (Clinton supported the campaign to ensure that 100 million families could access microcredit, a target fixed in Beijing and reached in 2006).
We remember the Clinton administration as being very much concerned about many of the big challenges ranging from the digital divide to the problems of an ageing population. Will Obama run the risk of concentrating too much on the economy, because of the global financial crisis? “I don’t think so. By putting Obama himself in a position where everybody
feels “this guy is speaking to me saying what I think”, he’s speaking for billions of people around the world, who are hanging the best hopes that they have on the shoulders of Obama.  I don’t think he can satisfy everybody by achieving a single goal, so if he concentrates only on US economics, all these hopes will remain unfulfilled and that would be not the right thing for him to do. Rather, he has to spread himself over some major issues, and he seems willing to do this. His first decision was a very symbolic one: he decided to close Guantánamo; I’m sure there are other issue that will follow. I hope that he will see to the things that need to be done straight away. And his long election campaign prepared him
for all this. I was very happy that he had to fight a long campaign. In the duel with Hillary for the Democratic nomination in state after state he had to review every single issue. That was a very good learning process: meeting people, talking to them. That’s how he prepared  imself. Coming completely new as a senator he didn’t have time to prepare himself for the presidency. Now we hope that he becomes a great president that the world will remember for a long time.