Arshia Tayyab Meets Nobel Prize Winner Mohammad Yunus

CCI's Arshia Tayyab recently had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Muhammad Yunus, managing director of the Grameen Bank. Yunus’ vision is the total eradication of poverty from the world. “Grameen,” according to Yunus, “is a message of hope, a program for putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long.”

“Meeting Muhammad Yunus was a thrill,” said Tayyab. “He told his story about Grameen Bank.” A former professor of economics, he is famous for his successful application of the concept of microcredit, the extension of small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans.

“He started by lending $27 to a group of people. At first, he used a local bank, which was sure that this idea would fail because people would not return the money,” said Tayyab. “Little by little, however, he was able to lend small amounts to an increasing number of the poor. He found that they were responsibly repaying the loans. But as he became more successful in this venture, the bank he was working through made the loans more difficult to obtain, so he applied to open a bank himself. It took two years to get all the paperwork arranged with the government, and the result was Grameen Bank.”

His work is a fundamental rethink on the economic relationship between the rich and the poor, their rights and their obligations. The World Bank recently acknowledged that “this business approach to the alleviation of poverty has allowed millions of individuals to work their way out of poverty with dignity.”

The lighthearted Yunus joked about the fact that Grameen Bank does everything the opposite of what a conventional bank does.

“Conventional banks give money to the rich; Grameen Bank gives money to the poor. Conventional banks want collateral; Grameen Bank does not require collateral. Conventional banks give money to men; Grameen Bank gives money to the women. Grameen bank is owned by the people who have the loans. Ninety-seven percent of the owners are women,” he said.

He also told the story of the beggar program at the bank, which in its first wave, quickly converted 10,000 beggars into sales people.

“In Bangladesh, beggars go door to door asking for money,” said Yunus. “The bank now provides them with something to sell, effectively making them into entrepreneurs. Originally, the program required each bank officer to support one beggar in an effort to get him or her off the street. The program was so effective that bank employees now each support four beggars. The result is that, to date, 27,000 beggars are now on their way to self-employment.”

“It was such a pleasure to meet him,” said Tayyab, “and speak to him in our common language, Hindi. He told me that he was in San Diego last week, and the next time he is in San Diego, he will connect with me. He was wearing traditional clothes, which were nice to see.”