“…Poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone.” Said Muhammad Yunus Director and founder of the Grameen Bank in 1974, and who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
According to the article “A bank for the Down and Out” written in The Independent on Sunday by Jolis in 1996, Muhammad Yunus was born in Chittagong in Eastern Bengal in 
1940. He studied at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, before becoming the head of the Economics Department at Chittagong University. The terrible manmade famine of 1974, which by some estimates killed 1.5 millions Bangladeshis, changed is life forever. While people were dying of hunger on the streets, he was teaching elegant theories of economics. He started hating himself for the arrogance of pretending he had the answers. Yunus decided that poor people themselves would be the teachers. Then he made a big discovery. One day, when he was interviewing a woman who made bamboo stools, he learned that, because she had no capital of her own, she had to borrow the equivalent of 23 cents to buy raw bamboo for each stool made. After repaying the middleman, she kept only 1.5 cents in profit. According to Yunus’ discovery: Their poverty was not a personal problem due to the laziness or a lack of intelligence, but a structural one lack of capital.
Micro credit program responds through 16 decisions, which are the Grameen Bank’s rules. The Grameen Bank lends money called micro credit to the poorest people, which gives loans to them that they can use them. By having loans they can create a small market and getting income to take care of their children, and buy what the family needs. In addition, according to Yunus, 96% of the Bank’s borrowers are Bangladeshi women who have never touched money before. Even though, all her life, her father and husband will have told her she is useless and a burden to the family, Yunus soon discovered that lending to women was much beneficial to whole family and that women were more careful about their debts. According to the studies of Grameen Bank, women are not seen as an object like in the past, and women became more independent as well. Moreover, benefits are seen through couples. As a result, couples get more involved in their union and the divorce rate jumped down among Grameen borrowers. In addition, according to one of the 16 decisions of Grameen bank: “We shall collectively undertake bigger investments for higher incomes.” Benefits became a social state. Women get more profit because they got more money being a group. Working as a group, women learn the way of responsibility to each other.
This revolutionary creation of micro-credit has given help and hope as a result in Bangladesh, but also through all others communities and countries where poverty exists. From this incredible and generous action, many profits have seen the day. Yunus’ dream is “the total eradication of poverty from the world.” And he also hopes that “one day, our grandchildren will go to the museums to see what poverty was like.”
Following from far the process of Muhammad Yunus in his adventure, unfortunately, in the article on Tuesday 8 March 2011 in Delhi and Saad Hammadhi in Dhaka, Jason Burke wrote in www.gardian.co.uk that “Grameen Bank staff and supporters surround its head office in Dhaka after a court upheld Muhammad Yunus’s dismissal from the bank he founded almost three decades ago.” The accusation was that “The Central Bank of Bangladesh, the nation’s financial regulatory authority, said Yunus, 70, was working in violation of the country’s statutory retirement age of 60 as its assent had not been sought for his continuing tenure. Yunus, an outspoken government critic and campaigner against corruption, claimed his removal was in “violation of … fundamental rights”. Yunus went through some disagreements with the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina as well. However, some other governments are involved as some personalities as well who think that the departure of Yunus will be a mistake. The high court responded saying, “The Central Bank’s decision did not violate the law.” The battle between Yunus and the government didn’t help the way of developing world for these poor people in increasing the hostility from politicians across the region.
As the result, in India, Burke wrote, “Politicians have accused bankers of profiting from the poor and, in some places, have banned further lending or recovery of debts. In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, aggressive selling by scores of unregulated microfinance firms has pushed huge numbers of already desperately poor farmers deeply into debt. The sadly side of these facts is that once again the poor people will be the first affected by those inconvenient. However, in the article, on Friday 13 May 2011 Saad Hammadhi in Dhaka, Fariha Karim wrote in www.gardian.co.uk that Muhammad Yunus has left as the head of Grameen Bank after a dispute with the Bangladeshi government.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/13/nobel-laureate-muhammad-yunus-microfinance
morgan75 