Page 10
Street Roots • Jan. 5-11, 2018
News
HIS PLAN FOR A WORLD
A $42 loan to impoverished workers fo u r decades ago led to a global microfinance movement that won
M uham m ad Yunus the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, he aim s to create a world where poverty doesn’t exist.
M > ikoor people are like bonsai plants. I f you take
the seed o f the tallest tree in the forest and
-L p u t it in a flowerpot, that tree will only grow
one meter high. You wonder, why does this tree not
grow as tall as the one you saw in the forest? I t
simply doesn’t have a proper base to grow. Society
never gives poor people the space, the base on which
to grow tall.”
- M u h a m m a d Yunus
BY STEVEN MACKENZIE
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
uhammad Yunus has transformed
the lives of millions of the poorest
people around the world. In the
1970s, he was working as a professor
University of Chittagong in his native
Bangladesh when he realized how small
loans could make a disproportionately
massive impact on people stuck in poverty.
He lent $42 of his own money to craft
workers, pioneering the concept of
microcredit. The Grameen Bank (which
means “village” bank) was established to
provide investment to people mainstream
banks traditionally avoid, basically spreading
a little more soil for seeds to grow in. Most
remarkably, loans are given entirely based
on trust, with an almost 100 percent
repayment rate.
“We don’t have any lawyers,” Yunus said.
“Trust begets trust. If you trust them, they
will trust you. Lawyers come when you
distrust each other.”
And although microcredit is by definition
small scale, together it all adds up. Today,
Grameen Bank lends over $2.5 billion a year
to 9 million borrowers, approving between
1,000 and 2,000 business proposals each
month. The microcredit movement has
spread throughout the world, operating in
the United Kingdom along with more than
$1 billion invested in the U.S., with plans to
double that in the next few years.
In 2006, Yunus’ work lifting millions out
of poverty won him the Nobel Peace Prize.
He continues to challenge the financial
system he believes is designed for wealth
monopoly rather than wealth distribution.
The system, he says, prioritizes banks that
are too big to fail while ignoring billions who
are too small to matter. With ever-rising
inequality, he fears we are reaching a global
tipping point.
“We are heading for massive disruption,
an explosive situation - socially, politically,
economically - because of wealth
concentration,” Yunus told The Big Issue -
Street Roots’ sister paper in the U.K. -
M
at the
P H O T O B Y T IM C A M P B E L L
Muhammad Yunus
while he was in New York, spreading his
message at the United Nations.
“Concentration of wealth also means
concentration of power, so you have a world
which is controlled by a handful of people,”
he said. “That is not a tenable situation.
Brexit may be an expression of that
dissatisfaction at the bottom. And look at
the United States, the election in Germany,
people at the bottom are very unhappy; they
are frustrated.
“The real issue is how to make sure
wealth does not flow in a one-way direction;
how to reverse that so wealth starts coming
from the top to be distributed so everybody
has a share.”
Redefining ‘self-interest’
Yunus has a plan to redesign the world’s
economic engine, ambitiously proposing a
world with zero poverty and zero
unemployment. All we have to do, he said,
is redefine the notion of “self-interest” and
the way we view our roles in the job
market.
Economic theory is fundamentally wrong
because it is based on the assumption that
See YUNUS, page 11