This post was written by Tom Braslavsky, a Hatchet columnist.
This Wednesday evening, Muhammad Yunus will be speaking at Lisner Auditorium. I’ve got my ticket clenched tightly in my fist.
Yunus, a renowned Bangladeshi economist and the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, has for decades been a pivotal figure in the effort to alleviate global poverty. The field that Yunus helped pioneer is called microcredit. It’s really quite simple: microcredit is the issuance of small loans – from $25 to over $1,000 – to poor people who want to bring themselves out of poverty by starting small businesses.
Yunus spearheaded large-scale microcredit with his establishment of the Grameen Bank – “Village Bank” – in the early 1980’s. Mostly lending to poor, rural women, the idea broke social as well as banking taboos. By 2007, according to Yunus, 58 percent of those who borrowed through the bank had risen above the poverty line.
In the last decade, microcredit has really taken off around the world. It’s an appealing idea: using capitalism to bring people out of poverty. It maintains the dignity of the poor, giving them the means with which to implement their ideas and help themselves.
And replications of Yunus’ project are reaching an increasing number of people. A report issued last week by the Microcredit Summit Campaign, which works to bring people out of poverty, stated that in 2007 alone 106 million poor families around the world received microloans. If you include family members, this means that in just one year Yunus’ ideas affected about half a billion people.
Muhammad Yunus is someone to admire, and his presence on campus should not go unnoticed. He has been able to start a sort of revolution in the way the global poor are treated, earning his nickname “banker to the poor”. Rather than having an unequal exchange (i.e. only giving charity), which results in looking down upon the less fortunate, microcredit puts the poor on a level playing field with the lenders, treating them as equals and giving them responsibility over their accomplishments.
Yunus’ speech on Wednesday will deal with the next steps the world must take in fighting global poverty. It promises to be a fascinating event, reminding us why we’re so lucky to be Colonials.
