Yunus wins peace Nobel for anti-poverty efforts

“I thought to myself, my God, for five takas she has become a slave,” Yunus said in the interview.

“I couldn’t understand how she could be so poor when she was making such beautiful things,” he said.

The following day, he and his students did a survey in the woman’s village, Jobra, and discovered that 43 of the villagers owed a total of 856 taka (about $27).

“I couldn’t take it anymore. I put the $27 out there and told them they could liberate themselves,” he said, and pay him back whenever they could. The idea was to buy their own materials and cut out the middleman.

They all paid him back, day by day, over a year, and his spur-of-the-moment generosity grew into a full-fledged business concept that came to fruition with the founding of Grameen Bank in 1983.

In the years since, the bank says it has lent $5.72 billion to more than 6 million Bangladeshis.

Worldwide, microcredit financing is estimated to have helped 92 million families last year alone, according to Jove Oliver, spokesman for the Microcredit Summit Campaign, part of the Washington-based Project Results Educational Fund.

“Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development,” the Nobel citation said.

Today, the bank claims to have 6.6 million borrowers, 97 percent of whom are women, and provides services in more than 70,000 villages in Bangladesh. Its model of micro-financing has inspired similar efforts around the world.

The success has allowed Grameen Bank to expand its credit to include housing loans, financing for irrigation and fisheries as well as traditional savings accounts.

One of Yunus’ aides, Dipal Barua, said the award was an “honor for millions of poor women who have made this possible.”

Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the Nobel committee that awarded the prize, told The AP that Yunus’s efforts have had visible results: “We are saying microcredit is an important contribution that cannot fix everything, but is a big help.”

Mjoes said at least three previous prizes have recognized the need to alleviate poverty and hunger.

Those were the 1970 prize to American agriculturalist Norman Borlaug for his program in Mexico to feed the hungry by improving wheat yields; the 1969 award to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization for its efforts to ease poverty; and the 1949 award to Baron John Boyd Orr, as head of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization who worked to persuade nations to make it a public policy to feed the poor.

The peace prize was the sixth and last Nobel prize announced this year. The others, for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and economics, were announced in Stockholm, Sweden.

MORE FROM WORLD BUSINESS

World business Section Front

Link found between Chinese drywall, corrosion GM asks Europe for up to $4.9 billion handout IMF chief: Global economy still fragile Report: Hershey may launch bid for Cadbury Europe: Drop some financial system crutches Dutch give ABN Amro billions in new bailout Hershey, Nutella-maker mull Cadbury bid Newsweek: Why Mary Kay thrives in China Slew of offshore tax evaders settle with IRS Cisco raises bid for Tandberg to $3.4 billion World business Section Front   Add World business headlines to your news reader: