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Date: January 24, 1997
Founder of Grameen Bank to Speak
on Creating a Poverty-free World
Princeton, N.J -- Muhammad Yunus, the founder and director of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, will give a lecture entitled "Towards Creating a Poverty-free World" at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on Thursday, February 6, in Robertson Hall, Bowl 1, at 4:30 p.m.
The innovative Grameen Bank ("bank of the village") Project was begun in Bangladesh in 1976 as a way to provide collateral-free credit to the rural poor. Now with over 1,000 branch offices, the Grameen Bank serves more than 1.5 million borrowers, providing loans mainly for planting crops, buying and raising livestock and poultry, and leasing land. Loans average $65 to $75 but can be as small as $20 to 25. Although the loans are very small by U.S. standards, they have reportedly enabled recipients to increase their incomes by as much as 50 percent over three years, making a significant difference in the economic situations of many needy families.
The majority of Grameen borrowers -- 92 percent -- are women, which, Yunus reports, accounts for much of the success of the program. "Money going through a woman to a household brought more benefit to the household than money entering the household through a man," Yunus said. "Children get priority from the mother. A man often has different priorities."
Because of its overwhelming success, the Grameen program has been adopted as a model for similar endeavors in Africa, Latin America, and the United States, and much has been written about the bank's development and expansion since its inception. In 1996 alone, three major studies came out, each focusing on a separate aspect of the bank's workings. These are Give Us Credit: How Muhammad Yunus's Micro-Credit Revolution Is Empowering Women from Bangladesh to Chicago by Alex Counts, The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank and the Idea That Is Helping the Poor Countries Change Their Lives by David Bornstein, and Women at the Centre: Grameen Bank Borrowers after One Decade by Helen Todd.
After founding the project and serving as project director, Yunus, an economist, went on to become the bank's managing director in 1983, the position he still holds today. At the same time, he has served on numerous national and international committees, including the Education Commission (1987 88) and the Presidential Committee on Health, Education, and Service (1987 88) in Bangladesh; and the Advisory Council for Sustainable Economic Development, World Bank (1993 present) and the Council of Patrons of Friends of the Earth International (1996). From 1975 to 1989, Yunus also was a professor of economics at Chittagong University in Bangladesh.
His lecture is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Center of International Affairs, and the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia.