Expanding Dr. Yunus' Sphere of Influence

This passage from an article on the background of newly elected US President Obama is highly illuminating and shows that he was exposed to micro-finance in an Islamic country early in his life:

In Dreams from My Father he tells of his late mother, Ann, a freethinking and fearless white woman from Kansas who married a black man from Kenya. Barely two years into the marriage, she was left to raise Mr Obama alone, yet she returned to college, studied for an anthropology degree and remarried, to an Indonesian student whom she followed to Jakarta with her son. She worked in Asia running microfinance projects that allowed women to become self-sufficient. “She was very clear that the best indicator of how a country is going to develop is how it treats its women and whether it educates its girls,” Mr Obama recalls.