In awarding the Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, the Nobel Committee has focused the world’s attention on the power of “bottom up” economic development. Jennifer Roback Morse reminds us that “the micro-credit movement has helped many of the poor become less poor, and to lift themselves, their families, and their neighbors out of abject poverty.”
Dr. Morse reflects on Yunus’ background as an economics professor, educated at Vanderbilt, teaching in Bangladesh and seeing the abject poverty that afflicted communities near his post. Muhammad Yunus began to reach out and practice his own principles, and started giving loans — not handouts — to people in these communities who he believed had the potential to work themselves out of poverty, given the chance. In conjunction with the Grameen Bank, Yunus has now financed millions of small projects, many of them requiring loans of only $50, and helped many poverty stricken, yet driven, people emerge from their poverty by the work of their own hands.
