Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award and Lecture

2004 WINNER--Muhammad Yunus

Watch the streaming video of Muhammad Yunus at Fuqua. (RealPlayer required).

DURHAM, N.C. April 6, 2004 — Muhammad Yunus, Founder and Managing Director of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, spoke to over 275 students and community members Tuesday at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Yunus, who was there to receive the 2004 CASE Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award, went on to say that access to credit should be a human right.

In 1974, Yunus was a Professor of Economics at Chittagong University in Bangladesh when his country was devastated by famine. Suddenly, he found himself frustrated with the impact he was having as a teacher. He recalled, "You teach elegant theories in the classroom, telling your students how to handle economic problems, how to resolve them, how to bring development...and you walk out of the classroom and see people dying of hunger, not because of disease, just not having enough to eat."

Seeking to understand the reality of the economics of the daily life of the poor, he set out to learn from the nearby villagers. Eventually, out of his own pocket, he loaned the equivalent of $27 to 42 women so that they could buy materials to make and sell stools. These tiny loans helped them break the devastating cycle of poverty and demonstrated to Yunus the power of “micro-credit” and self-employment in helping poor people generate income. Recognizing that the existing banking system was designed to “keep poor people out” and, in his world, “reject women,” Yunus had taken his first concrete step towards becoming the “Banker to the Poor.” He soon established the Grameen Bank, a revolutionary financial institution that extends small loans for income generation to the poor. Grameen does not rely on collateral, long-term loans, lump-sum repayments, and legal agreements, but rather on peer lending groups, one-year loans, weekly installments, and trust and faith in the human potential.

In Bangladesh today, Grameen has 1,084 branches, with 12,500 staff serving 2.1 million borrowers in 37,000 villages. On any working day Grameen collects an average of $1.5 million in weekly installments. Of the borrowers, 94% are women and over 98% of the loans are paid back, a recovery rate higher than any other banking system. Grameen methods are applied in projects in 58 countries, including the US, Canada, France, The Netherlands and Norway.

Yunus ended his presentation with a challenge: "How easy it is for us to underestimate people and their resolve. If you could get over that and believe in the potential of human beings, and design everything with that as the basis, we would have a world without any poor people and poverty truly would be in the poverty museum, no where else in the world."