Nobel winning banker to speak on campus of West Georgia

• Miscellaneous
• 27th August 2010
• YC

By Neighbor Staff

Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi banker and economist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, will lecture at 3 p.m. Friday, Aug. 27, at the University of West Georgia’s Townsend Center for the Performing Arts in Carrollton

The presentation, free and open to the public, will conclude with Yunus signing copies of his book, “Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs,” available for $25.

Yunus is known throughout the world as the “father of microcredit” for developing the system that extends small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. Yunus discovered that such loans could make significant differences to impoverished people trying to start a business. His first loan was $27 from his own pocket.

In 1983, he created the Grameen Bank, which specialized in this type of loan to help develop economies and societies. By 2007, Grameen had issued $6.4 billion in loans to more than 7 million borrowers.

To ensure repayment, the bank uses “solidarity groups,” informal groups who apply together for loans, in which members act as co-guarantors of repayment and back each other’s efforts at economic self-advancement.

In 2006, the Nobel Committee cited Yunus’s actions to raise millions of people worldwide out of poverty.

In addition to “Building Social Business,” Yunus has written the books “Banker to the Poor,” and “Creating a World Without Poverty.”