Richly deserved prize for banker to the poor: nominate this up kids :)

[nam78_two]

A very neat oped on Mohammed Yunus-truly inspiring....
I saw a lot of threads on Yunus but I didn't see any on the greatest page and I do think its a very cool and inspiring story :)!

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0610140237oct14,1,3952805.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

Richly deserved prize for banker to the poor
Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has helped lift millions of women and men from poverty, nurturing the entrepreneurial spirit one small loan at a time

By Tom Hundley, Tribune foreign correspondent. Tribune news services contributed to this report
Published October 14, 2006

LONDON -- It would have been more charitable--and certainly a lot easier--just to give the poor woman the money. But instead, Muhammad Yunus lent her $27.

"Charity is not the answer to poverty," Yunus wrote earlier this year. "It only helps poverty to continue. It creates dependency and takes away the individual's initiative to break through the wall of poverty."

The woman and several of her friends used the small loan to start a successful furniture-making business and to escape the bonds of poverty in their rural Bangladeshi village. They repaid the loan in full.

Thirty years and more than $5.7 billion in loans later, Yunus' insight into the nature of poverty and the spirit of entrepreneurship has earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.

On Friday, the Norwegian Nobel committee awarded the $1.4 million prize jointly to Yunus and Grameen Bank, the lending agency he founded in 1983 to pioneer the concept of microcredit--small loans that have helped lift millions out of poverty.

"Muhammad Yunus has shown himself to be a leader who has managed to translate visions into practical action for the benefit of millions of people, not only in Bangladesh but also in many other countries," the Nobel committee said in its citation.

Yunus is the first Nobel laureate from Bangladesh, a wrenchingly poor South Asia country that usually makes headlines for floods and famines.

"I am so, so happy. It's really great news for the whole nation," Yunus told The Associated Press from his home in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital.

Yunus, in a 2004 interview with AP, said the idea of using seemingly insignificant loans to help the poor came to him in 1974 while he was doing field work as a rural economist at the University of Chittagong. He met Sufia Begum, a 21-year-old mother of three, who was trying to make ends meet by making bamboo stools.

She explained to him that she had borrowed about 5 taka (9 cents) from a village moneylender for the raw materials to make each stool but collected only 2 cents in profit on the finished product after repaying the interest on her debt.

`She has become a slave'

"I thought to myself: My God, for 5 taka 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."

Yunus investigated further and discovered that the female artisans in the village owed the moneylender a total of 856 taka, or $27.

"I couldn't take it anymore. I put the $27 out there and told them they could liberate themselves," he said. By cutting out the moneylender and his exorbitant interest rates, the women quickly earned a decent return on their labor and repaid their loan to Yunus.

[Jcrowley]

1. First let me say

that I have the utmost respect for you. Second I must say that I disagree with this choice for the Nobel Peace prize pretty strongly. Ultimately Yunus is only a businessman, as he states himself, who sees market-based solutions as a panacea for the impoverished. In fact I find this deeply disturbing on many levels but I'll leave that for another time. Now let's give the award to someone who really challenges the entire system which brings about the levels of depradation and warfare we are witnessing on Planet Earth circa 2006. How about Vandana Shiva for starters?


GrameenPhone Ltd. is the next twist in Muhammad Yunus's brand of capitalism. The company is a consortium of four partners: Yunus's Grameen Telecom (a 35% shareholder); Telenor AS, the main Norwegian telecommunications company (51%); Marubeni Corp. of Japan (9.5%); and New York-based Gonofone Development Corp. (4.5%). GrameenPhone opened for business last spring.

Many of Yunus's admirers see him as a social crusader. He sees something else. "I am a businessman," he says, "but it's business with a twist. I practice business with a social objective. That's what's missing from the capitalist system. We look for market solutions to social problems.

I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me. And yet assure myself and others, that I am very sorry for him and wish to lighten his burden by all possible means. Except, by getting off his back.

- Leo Tolstoy

[nam78_two]

2. Thanks for your input-always valued

:hi:

I do admire Vandana Shiva a lot-was she ever even nominated?

I do see your point about the capitalist aspect of it, but my grasp on economics is pretty rudimentary-some of things he says seem to make sense to me.
I have worked with some NGOs that work with alleviating poverty in India/China/Bangladesh etc. and one problem that seemed to surface with regard to funding was the dependance on charitable donations. I do realize that the catch-all market based solution can have a lot of problems but
I do like the idea of an NGO lending money (with no profit motive) and the money comes back with maybe a small amount of interest and now you lend all of that back to other needy people and so on? And each cycle you have just a little bit more to lend and so on. Does that make sense? Maybe thats incredibly naive but just as an idea it appeals to me :).

And the one aspect of this prize that I generally like is attention brought to some of the poorest countries in the world this way.

I actually liked the 2004 awardee -Wangaari Maathai

I guess I should read up a little more on him though-if you have any links I would appreciate them.

[Jcrowley]

3. Vandana Shiva

won the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize, in 1993.

Interesting note about the origin of the Nobel Prize it started out as PR. In 1888, a rumor of Mr. Dynamite's death led to an obituary in a French Newspaper that read, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." Nobel, who was not dead, belatedly moved to "revise" his legacy. The Nobel Prizes were the result.

One of the things that troubles me about this particular year's awarding is that it reinforces some deeply diseased concepts that seem intractable at this stage of human "development." Problem with disease? Apply technology and we can all live better through chemicals. We may wonder why the telephone is an image that captures the western consciousness. The telephone is representative of technology as our solution and the path to paradise. If there is a problem, apply technology and a solution will emerge.

:hi: