Banker to the Poor
Muhammad Yunus (1940)
Founder Grameen Bank. Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2006 as the first
Bangladeshi Nobel laureate.
Banker to the Poor is Muhammad Yunus's memoir of how he decided to
change his life in order to help the world's poor. In it he traces the
intellectual and spiritual journey that led him to fundamentally rethink
the economic relationship between rich and poor, and the challenges he
and his colleagues faced in founding Grameen
Banker to the Poor
In 1974, while Muhammad Yunus was teaching economics in Bangladesh, the
country was ravaged by famine. Increasingly uncomfortable teaching
abstract theories while starving people shuffled by outside his
classroom, Yunus realized his economic education was incomplete. To
complete it, he went to local villages to "learn from the poor" about
what they actually needed rather than what a textbook said they should
have. The answer was credit, so Yunus founded a bank to provide it -
Grameen Bank. The name means the "bank of the village." Today, Yunus is
a Nobel Peace Price winner and Grameen Bank has extended credit to more
than 2.6 million people. This down-to-earth, unsentimental autobiography
recounts what inspired him, the obstacles he overcame and the ultimate
success of this project, his life's work. getAbstract highly
recommends it to anyone who wants to know how one person's efforts can
have a huge impact.