The Man who is ‘Creating a world without poverty’-an interview in Santa Barbara Independent

In Santa Barbara Independent Richard Appelbaum noted an interview with the the man who is creating a world without poverty:

Muhammad Yunus is the winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize or his path-breaking work in bringing microcredit (tiny loans for small businesses) to millions of impoverished Bangladeshis through the creation of the Grameen Bank.

The idea for microcredit began in the early ’70s, when Yunus — an economist from Bangladesh’s Chittagong University — led his students on a field trip to a poor village, where they interviewed a woman who made bamboo stools. Yunus learned that she had to borrow money at rates as high as 10 percent per week for the bamboo she used — a cost that left her with only two pennies a day as her total income. Had she been able to borrow under fair conditions, she would have been able to amass an economic cushion and rise above a subsistence level.

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.