Muhammad Yunus is a modest man with much to be immodest about. In the mid-1970s, he started providing small loans to the poor of Bangladesh and in 1983 he established a bank, which he called Grameen (”of the village” in Bengali). Grameen flourished, and now employs 25,000 people. Every year it lends over $500m in small loans, primarily to women. This “microcredit” model has been copied all over the developing world, and in 2006 Yunus and Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize.
Not content with setting up one business, Yunus has created a series of companies under the Grameen brand name to provide cheap goods and services to the poor: mobile phones, student loans, knitwear, a textile mill, an eye clinic and, most recently, a joint venture with the French company Danone to sell low-cost yoghurt to rural children. Yunus has also written a manifesto for his style of entrepreneurship, which he calls “social business.” This, he claims, will make it possible to put an end to world poverty, and on a shorter timescale than most people think achievable. It is, then, a very big idea, even if he is only partly right about the scale of the benefits involved.
In February, Yunus came to London to promote his new book Creating a World Without Poverty (PublicAffairs). I met him one cold morning, and we spent an hour talking about the book’s central idea: the prospects for social business—businesses whose primary goal is to help the poor. As befits a former academic, Yunus’s style of advocacy is patient and clear.
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