Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. Yunus.
IndianSummer
Posts: 854
The Nobel Peace Prize 2006
"for their efforts to create economic and social development from below"
Muhammad Yunus Grameen Bank
half of the prize half of the prize
Bangladesh Dhaka, Bangladesh
Founder of Grameen Bank Founded in 1976
INTERVIEW
Muhammad Yunus
The Nobel Peace Prize 2006
Interview
"... poverty in the world is an artificial creation"
Telephone interview with Professor Muhammad Yunus immediately following the announcement of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, October 13, 2006. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.
[Muhammad Yunus' assistant, Akhtar] – Hello.
[Adam Smith] – Hello, Akhtar, this is Adam Smith, from Stockholm.
[Akhtar] – Hello.
[AS] – Hello.
[Akhtar] – Yes.
[AS] – Is it possible to speak to Professor Yunus now?
[Akhtar] – You are from?
[AS] – From Stockholm. This is Adam Smith from the Nobel Foundation, from the website of the Nobel Foundation.
[Akhtar] – Oh, OK, just hold on.
Background conversation.
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – Hello.
[AS] – Hello, Professor Yunus, this is Adam Smith from the website of the Nobel Foundation.
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – Oh, I'm not Yunus, I'm not Yunus. I'm his brother speaking. He's busy with many people around him.
[AS] – Ah-ha, right. Would it be possible to spend just a couple of minutes, just one or two minutes speaking to him?
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – Yeah, yeah, but we have to ... I will officiate if you can call in just a few minutes.
[AS] – A few minutes. Should I hold or ...
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – It's OK?
[AS] – Yes, shall I hold on the telephone because it has been very difficult to get through, so shall I just hold?
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – Oh, I see, I see, I see. This is from Nobel? Hello, from where are you speaking?
[AS] – Yes, we call from Stockholm, from the website of the Foundation, the Nobel Foundation, and we ...
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – OK, OK, OK. Please don't take more than two minutes, OK?
[AS] – I promise I will not.
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – Hang on just a minute.
Background conversation.
[Muhammad Yunus] – Hello, hello.
[AS] – Hello, Professor Yunus?
[MY] – Yes, yes, yes, speaking.
[AS] – Hello, thank you, my name's Adam Smith. I'm calling from the website of the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm to congratulate you, and just to ask ...
[MY] – Oh, thank you so much.
[AS] – We record one minute of interview with new Laureates as soon as they hear, so this is for this purpose.
[MY] – OK.
[AS] – I just wanted to ask you ...
[MY] – OK, go ahead.
[AS] – Two very quick questions. The first is, obviously the prize will bring greatly increased publicity for your work, is there a particular message...
[MY] – Absolutely.
[AS] – Is there any particular message you would like to use the opportunity to get across?
[MY] – The one message that we are trying to promote all the time, that poverty in the world is an artificial creation. It doesn't belong to human civilization, and we can change that, we can make people come out of poverty and have the real state of affairs. So the only thing we have to do is to redesign our institutions and policies, and there will be no people who will be suffering from poverty. So I would hope that this award will make this message heard many times, and in a kind of forceful way, so that people start believing that we can create a poverty-free world. That's what I would like to do.
[AS] – Thank you very much, and does your work with the ...
[MY] – Thank you.
[AS] – Does your work with the Grameen Bank over the last three decades make you more hopeful that this is possible?
[MY] – Oh yes, very much, we see the demonstration of it every day. People come out of poverty every day. So it's right in front of us what happens and it can be done globally, it can be done more forcefully, we can organize more things to go with it, so this is something not theoretical issue, it's a very real issue. People can change their own lives, provided they have the right kind of institutional support. They're not asking for charity, charity is no solution to poverty. Poverty is the creation of opportunities like everybody else has, not the poor people, so bring them to the poor people, so that they can change their lives. That's all we are doing. We didn't do anything special; lend money to the people so – but they never lent it to the poor people – all we did was we lent it to the poor people, and that makes the trick. That makes the change.
[AS] – Thank you very much indeed for speaking to us.
[MY] – Thank you, thank you.
[AS] – One can hear in the background just how exciting this is for everybody so I'll let you get back to it.
[MY] – I know, I know, there's a big crowd here, I know. Thank you, thank you very much, bye, bye.
[AS] – Congratulations, bye, bye.
[MY] – Bye, bye. Thank you.
"for their efforts to create economic and social development from below"
Muhammad Yunus Grameen Bank
half of the prize half of the prize
Bangladesh Dhaka, Bangladesh
Founder of Grameen Bank Founded in 1976
INTERVIEW
Muhammad Yunus
The Nobel Peace Prize 2006
Interview
"... poverty in the world is an artificial creation"
Telephone interview with Professor Muhammad Yunus immediately following the announcement of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, October 13, 2006. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.
[Muhammad Yunus' assistant, Akhtar] – Hello.
[Adam Smith] – Hello, Akhtar, this is Adam Smith, from Stockholm.
[Akhtar] – Hello.
[AS] – Hello.
[Akhtar] – Yes.
[AS] – Is it possible to speak to Professor Yunus now?
[Akhtar] – You are from?
[AS] – From Stockholm. This is Adam Smith from the Nobel Foundation, from the website of the Nobel Foundation.
[Akhtar] – Oh, OK, just hold on.
Background conversation.
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – Hello.
[AS] – Hello, Professor Yunus, this is Adam Smith from the website of the Nobel Foundation.
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – Oh, I'm not Yunus, I'm not Yunus. I'm his brother speaking. He's busy with many people around him.
[AS] – Ah-ha, right. Would it be possible to spend just a couple of minutes, just one or two minutes speaking to him?
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – Yeah, yeah, but we have to ... I will officiate if you can call in just a few minutes.
[AS] – A few minutes. Should I hold or ...
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – It's OK?
[AS] – Yes, shall I hold on the telephone because it has been very difficult to get through, so shall I just hold?
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – Oh, I see, I see, I see. This is from Nobel? Hello, from where are you speaking?
[AS] – Yes, we call from Stockholm, from the website of the Foundation, the Nobel Foundation, and we ...
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – OK, OK, OK. Please don't take more than two minutes, OK?
[AS] – I promise I will not.
[Muhammad Yunus' brother] – Hang on just a minute.
Background conversation.
[Muhammad Yunus] – Hello, hello.
[AS] – Hello, Professor Yunus?
[MY] – Yes, yes, yes, speaking.
[AS] – Hello, thank you, my name's Adam Smith. I'm calling from the website of the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm to congratulate you, and just to ask ...
[MY] – Oh, thank you so much.
[AS] – We record one minute of interview with new Laureates as soon as they hear, so this is for this purpose.
[MY] – OK.
[AS] – I just wanted to ask you ...
[MY] – OK, go ahead.
[AS] – Two very quick questions. The first is, obviously the prize will bring greatly increased publicity for your work, is there a particular message...
[MY] – Absolutely.
[AS] – Is there any particular message you would like to use the opportunity to get across?
[MY] – The one message that we are trying to promote all the time, that poverty in the world is an artificial creation. It doesn't belong to human civilization, and we can change that, we can make people come out of poverty and have the real state of affairs. So the only thing we have to do is to redesign our institutions and policies, and there will be no people who will be suffering from poverty. So I would hope that this award will make this message heard many times, and in a kind of forceful way, so that people start believing that we can create a poverty-free world. That's what I would like to do.
[AS] – Thank you very much, and does your work with the ...
[MY] – Thank you.
[AS] – Does your work with the Grameen Bank over the last three decades make you more hopeful that this is possible?
[MY] – Oh yes, very much, we see the demonstration of it every day. People come out of poverty every day. So it's right in front of us what happens and it can be done globally, it can be done more forcefully, we can organize more things to go with it, so this is something not theoretical issue, it's a very real issue. People can change their own lives, provided they have the right kind of institutional support. They're not asking for charity, charity is no solution to poverty. Poverty is the creation of opportunities like everybody else has, not the poor people, so bring them to the poor people, so that they can change their lives. That's all we are doing. We didn't do anything special; lend money to the people so – but they never lent it to the poor people – all we did was we lent it to the poor people, and that makes the trick. That makes the change.
[AS] – Thank you very much indeed for speaking to us.
[MY] – Thank you, thank you.
[AS] – One can hear in the background just how exciting this is for everybody so I'll let you get back to it.
[MY] – I know, I know, there's a big crowd here, I know. Thank you, thank you very much, bye, bye.
[AS] – Congratulations, bye, bye.
[MY] – Bye, bye. Thank you.
I have faced it, A life wasted...
Take my hand, my child of love
Come step inside my tears
Swim the magic ocean,
I've been crying all these years
Take my hand, my child of love
Come step inside my tears
Swim the magic ocean,
I've been crying all these years
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
By Amelia Gentleman, Anand Giridharadas and Keith Bradsher International Herald Tribune, The New York Times
Published: October 13, 2006
NEW DELHI The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, for pioneering work in pulling millions of women out of poverty through small loans.
The prize lends heft to an idea already gaining ground in anti-poverty circles: that capitalist methods can be more effective in curbing poverty than traditional grant-giving by governments and bodies like the World Bank.
The award "is fitting acknowledgment that the ways of the market are not necessarily evil, that markets can be harnessed as forces of good if done properly," said Nachiket Mor, the director of Icici Bank, the largest Indian private- sector lender. Mor manages about $550 million in microcredit, the small loans modeled on Grameen's approach.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited Yunus and Grameen for their "efforts to create economic and social development from below."
"Loans to poor people without any financial security had appeared to be an impossible idea," the citation read. "From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed microcredit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty."
Since its creation in 1983, Grameen has issued small loans worth $5.72 billion. It turned a profit in all but three years. Last year, it earned $15 million.
Yunus is credited by experts with a simple but revolutionary idea: The poor can be as reliable in borrowing as the rich, but only if the rules of lending are rewritten to replace traditional risk management with the power of trust.
Until the onset of microcredit, banks in the developing world typically refused to lend to the poor. Aid workers say lack of access to loans traps farmers in a cycle of underinvestment, antiquated methods and low yields. It also deprives developing economies of viable small businesses.
The inspiration for Grameen Bank came to Yunus during a trip to Jobra, a village in Bangladesh, during the devastating famine of 1976. He met a woman who was struggling to make ends meet weaving bamboo stools. Because she had no assets, she was unable to borrow from the conventional banks and had to turn to local moneylenders. The extortionate interest left her with virtually no earnings.
Yunus, then a professor of rural economics at Chittagong University, lent $27 of his own money to her and several other villagers, enabling them to buy raw materials for their work. He was surprised to discover that the borrowers, mainly women, paid back their loans in full and on time.
Determined to prove that lending to the poor was not an "impossible proposition," Yunus went from village to village that year offering more tiny loans.
In 1983, Yunus formalized his loan portfolio as Grameen Bank, which employs a fundamental innovation in credit: Instead of managing risk by taking collateral, Grameen made borrowers, almost always women, take out loans in groups of five. Each would thus be guaranteeing the other's dependability. The threat of being shamed by their peers was often enough to deter those considering a default.
"We have no guarantee, no references, no legal instrument, and still it works," Yunus told Fortune magazine. "It defies all the conventional wisdom."
The bank now reports having 6.61 million borrowers, 97 percent of whom are women. Its loan-recovery rate is a near-flawless 98.5 percent. Conventional banks in Bangladesh, which lend mainly to affluent families with collateral, have recovery rates of 45 percent to 50 percent, said Mustafizur Rahman, research director at the Center for Policy Dialogue in Dhaka.
Grameen Bank has also helped transform attitudes toward women in Bangladesh by giving them access to credit and better health and education, Rahman said. The Nobel citation described microcredit as a "liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions."
The son of a wealthy goldsmith, Yunus has stressed that it was his mother's charitable nature that instilled in him a sense of duty to the poor.
Foreign Minister M. Morshed Khan called the recognition a great honor for Bangladesh. "Grameen will remain as a landmark," he said by telephone, adding that he and Yunus had known each other as children. "I could feel from that time he was a great achiever, and that one day he would do something important." Khan noted that it was the first time a Bangladeshi had received a Nobel Prize.
As for Yunus, the prestige of the Nobel and the $1.4 million prize money, shared equally between him and his bank, will propel him one short step closer to a distant goal. "One day," he has often said, "our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like."
Amelia Gentleman and Anand Giridharadas reported for the International Herald Tribune. Keith Bradsher reported for The New York Times.
NEW DELHI The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, for pioneering work in pulling millions of women out of poverty through small loans.
The prize lends heft to an idea already gaining ground in anti-poverty circles: that capitalist methods can be more effective in curbing poverty than traditional grant-giving by governments and bodies like the World Bank.
The award "is fitting acknowledgment that the ways of the market are not necessarily evil, that markets can be harnessed as forces of good if done properly," said Nachiket Mor, the director of Icici Bank, the largest Indian private- sector lender. Mor manages about $550 million in microcredit, the small loans modeled on Grameen's approach.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited Yunus and Grameen for their "efforts to create economic and social development from below."
"Loans to poor people without any financial security had appeared to be an impossible idea," the citation read. "From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed microcredit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty."
Since its creation in 1983, Grameen has issued small loans worth $5.72 billion. It turned a profit in all but three years. Last year, it earned $15 million.
Yunus is credited by experts with a simple but revolutionary idea: The poor can be as reliable in borrowing as the rich, but only if the rules of lending are rewritten to replace traditional risk management with the power of trust.
Until the onset of microcredit, banks in the developing world typically refused to lend to the poor. Aid workers say lack of access to loans traps farmers in a cycle of underinvestment, antiquated methods and low yields. It also deprives developing economies of viable small businesses.
The inspiration for Grameen Bank came to Yunus during a trip to Jobra, a village in Bangladesh, during the devastating famine of 1976. He met a woman who was struggling to make ends meet weaving bamboo stools. Because she had no assets, she was unable to borrow from the conventional banks and had to turn to local moneylenders. The extortionate interest left her with virtually no earnings.
Yunus, then a professor of rural economics at Chittagong University, lent $27 of his own money to her and several other villagers, enabling them to buy raw materials for their work. He was surprised to discover that the borrowers, mainly women, paid back their loans in full and on time.
Determined to prove that lending to the poor was not an "impossible proposition," Yunus went from village to village that year offering more tiny loans.
In 1983, Yunus formalized his loan portfolio as Grameen Bank, which employs a fundamental innovation in credit: Instead of managing risk by taking collateral, Grameen made borrowers, almost always women, take out loans in groups of five. Each would thus be guaranteeing the other's dependability. The threat of being shamed by their peers was often enough to deter those considering a default.
"We have no guarantee, no references, no legal instrument, and still it works," Yunus told Fortune magazine. "It defies all the conventional wisdom."
The bank now reports having 6.61 million borrowers, 97 percent of whom are women. Its loan-recovery rate is a near-flawless 98.5 percent. Conventional banks in Bangladesh, which lend mainly to affluent families with collateral, have recovery rates of 45 percent to 50 percent, said Mustafizur Rahman, research director at the Center for Policy Dialogue in Dhaka.
Grameen Bank has also helped transform attitudes toward women in Bangladesh by giving them access to credit and better health and education, Rahman said. The Nobel citation described microcredit as a "liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions."
The son of a wealthy goldsmith, Yunus has stressed that it was his mother's charitable nature that instilled in him a sense of duty to the poor.
Foreign Minister M. Morshed Khan called the recognition a great honor for Bangladesh. "Grameen will remain as a landmark," he said by telephone, adding that he and Yunus had known each other as children. "I could feel from that time he was a great achiever, and that one day he would do something important." Khan noted that it was the first time a Bangladeshi had received a Nobel Prize.
As for Yunus, the prestige of the Nobel and the $1.4 million prize money, shared equally between him and his bank, will propel him one short step closer to a distant goal. "One day," he has often said, "our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like."
Amelia Gentleman and Anand Giridharadas reported for the International Herald Tribune. Keith Bradsher reported for The New York Times.
Take my hand, my child of love
Come step inside my tears
Swim the magic ocean,
I've been crying all these years
R.i.p. My Dad - May 28, 2007
R.i.p. Black Tail (cat) - Sept. 20, 2008
Take my hand, my child of love
Come step inside my tears
Swim the magic ocean,
I've been crying all these years
R.i.p. My Dad - May 28, 2007
R.i.p. Black Tail (cat) - Sept. 20, 2008
It makes me happy to find it here.
I also think it is wonderful that this man with his vision won the nobel peace award.
good choice and a good example with a great story to tell
... to all of us.
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.