‘Social business can create a world without poverty’

Social citizen writes on the book:

…………according to Bill Gates.

Social businesses are set up like investment accounts where the money is returned over time and the interest is paid in social dividends. Social businesses are created in the traditional capitalist business model, except the investors & owners of the company know they will never receive dividends or profits on their earnings. All of this money is used in the community.

For Bill Gates this concept is already second nature. He calls it “creative capitalism“. Gates says that while capitalism is “responsible for the great innovations that have improved the lives of billions … to harness this power so it benefits everyone, we need to refine the system.” His refining of the system means converting to social business.

‘As if being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize weren’t enough’

The Milken Institute discusses the “Creating a world without poverty’ as an event:
As if being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize weren’t enough, Muhammad Yunus has set his sights on a new goal: turning the entire current cannon of business thought on its head. As captured in his latest book, Creating a World Without Poverty, Yunus is determined to bring about a tremendous change in our current understanding of what it really means to turn a profit.

a review in Peter unzipped

Following is the personal accounts on ‘Creating a world without poverty’ in Peter Unzipped:
Yesterday I finished Creating a World Without Poverty, a book by Muhammad Yunus that covers a lot of ground but mainly focuses on social business. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, a social business lies somewhere between a for-profit business and a charity. For the most part, a social business operates like a for-profit business except it does not pay dividends – it only returns the original investment to it’s investors, any profits are used to expand the business. Like a charity the goal of a social business is to meet a particular social need, but unlike a charity it seeks to be self-sustaining so that it does not have to rely on donors for cash.

Yunus walks the talk on poverty

BILL WILLIAMS reviewed the book in National Catholic REPORTER:

Muhammad Yunus was looking forward to a career as an economics professor when he became curious about why so many people in his native Bangladesh were mired in poverty.

He had encountered a woman who turned to a local moneylender whenever she needed cash for materials to make stools. The moneylender required that she sell him everything she produced at a price he would determine, a system Mr. Yunus equated with “slave labor.” Mr. Yunus then began lending money out of his own pocket to poor women and eventually founded Grameen Bank to provide small, low-interest loans to people with no credit history and no collateral.

Make things happen

Arvind Devalia noted his observations on the book in his blog

Last Saturday I was lucky enough to hear live a lecture by Professor Muhammad Yunus at the wonderful St James Church in Piccadilly London. Professor Yunus was honoured and recognised for this life changing work amongst the poor of Bangladesh with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

I was especially lucky to have had front row seats – and you can see more pictures on my Facebook profile.

It was quite an inspirational day – here was an amazing man with the lofty ambition of eliminating poverty from the world and to one day make it simply non existent – so that we would need “Poverty Museums” to show future generations what life used to be like for the majority of people on earth. They will wonder why poverty existed so long in humankind – and how there could have been so much inequality in the world.