Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Banker to the Poor is a memoir of the birth of microcredit. The Grameen Bank is now a $2.5 billion banking enterprise in Bangladesh, while the microcredit model has spread to over 50 countries worldwide, from the US to Papua New Guinea, Norway to Nepal.
Are you saying that people are less predictable than economics allows?
No. People are very predictable. They want to make money and they want to change the world. But that door was never open to them because economics never put that aspect of people into the theory.
So, I say why don’t you create that part of economics and then we can do both things? We can create business for selfish purposes, which we do today, and we can create business for selfless purposes too, meaning solving the problems that we have around us. And I call this a social business and that is the subject of my book. How do you build a social business?
How do you?
We have created a lot of social businesses in Bangladesh. One example is the joint venture with multi-national company Danone. We have created Garmeen-Danone in Bangladesh – Danone is a yoghurt company. So this is a social business, as apart from the other part of Danone which is money-making. This is designed to solve the problem of malnutrition among the children of Bangladesh. Half the children in Bangladesh are malnourished and good nutrition is in very, very short supply among the children here.
What we did is we made this yoghurt and put all the micro-nutrients that the children lack into the yoghurt and we made it very, very cheap so that children can eat it (and they love it!) and if they eat this yoghurt for eight to nine months, two cups a week, they will regain all their health because it contains all the nutrition they need. This is the objective for which the company was created and Danone and Garmeen will never take any profit out of it because this is not a company to make money; it is a company to solve a problem in a business way. So the company makes enough money to continue business and cover costs without fresh investment. That is a social business.
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Professor Yunus is a Bangladeshi banker, founder of Grameen Bank, economist and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. As a professor of economics he developed the concepts of microcredit and microfinance – loans for those too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. He has lifted millions of Bangladeshi families out of poverty. Yunus serves on the board of directors of the United Nations Foundation, a public charity created in 1998 with entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner’s $1 billion gift to support UN causes.
