In fact, the book was originally published by Public Affairs in New York, but was reprinted by Subarna in Dhaka.

Yunus discusses huge impact of tiny loans
Nobel-winning microlender tells young entrepreneurs to put business principles to work for good, not goods
By Aldo Svaldi

Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus told a Denver audience Thursday that the idea of making small-business loans to the poor is so simple, he has struggled his whole life to make people believe it.”No collateral, no guarantees, no lawyers,” Yunus said of loans extended to people in desperate poverty.Despite their surface risk, the tiny loans, which average only $150 per borrower, have been repaid at a rate of 98 percent.

Starting with $27 Yunus lent out to 42 Bangladeshi borrowers in 1976, Grameen Bank has disbursed $6.7 billion to 7.5 million borrowers, almost all of them female.

The member-owned bank has moved into more than two dozen other ventures, including providing cellphones and solar-power systems.

Like Grameen, the microcredit movement is moving beyond providing capital to the poor to creating businesses that serve a greater social good.

“Business is the means. The end is doing good,” Yunus told more than 500 people gathered Thursday for the “Social Business and Microeconomic Opportunities for Youth” conference at the Four Points Sheraton in Denver.

Sule Amandu, Michael Calla han, Jacob Castillo and Patrick Flynn from Colorado State University were among the young entrepreneurs at the conference to present their business plans.

Their venture, called PowerMundo, seeks a more efficient method for distributing energy- conserving devices in developing countries. They are testing their ideas in Peru with cookstoves and solar lights.”We want to be the Circuit City for sustainable products,” Calla han said.

Besides young entrepreneurs, the social business movement has also attracted corporate giants.

French food manufacturer Danone and Grameen have a joint venture to produce a yogurt with micronutrients often lacking in the diets of impoverished children.

The microcredit movement has set a goal of eradicating global poverty by 2025.

Muhammad Yunus made his mark with micro-credit, starting with a handful of 50-cent hip-pocket loans and building it into a bank that has provided $6 billion to 7.5 million borrowers.

This stellar record built the 67-year-old Bangladeshi’s reputation as “banker to the poor” and won him and his Grameen Bank a Nobel Peace Prize last year.

But micro-lending is only a small part of what Yunus turns his hand to these days. The famed bank is just one of 25 Grameen companies that range from cellphone and Internet providers to manufacturing and sales firms, training and health-care institutions, property developers and asset managers.

They’re all run on a new model he touts in Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism (written with Karl Weber, published by Public Affairs, 261 pages, $31.50). They’re so-called social businesses: Their bottom line is the good they produce for the community.

Although these businesses must cover their costs, they don’t seek a profit. Yet Grameen Phone, to single out but one, has grown into Bangladesh’s largest company. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Yunus has become convinced that this kind of business is the wave of the future.

Yet, as he tells it, this not-so-little business empire evolved largely by accident. The former head of a university economics department, he never aspired to be a banker. Indeed, he spend years trying to convince conventional bankers to take a chance on poor people as borrowers, and only undertook to do it himself when they wouldn’t.

So, too, with the other Grameen businesses. He and his staff would see niches no one else would fill and, in frustration, start their own companies.

The story of two-year-old Grameen Danone, a yogurt manufacturer with a mandate to provide nutritious, low-cost food to poor people, is a little different. It grew from a carefully thought-out partnership with Danone Dairy, a French for-profit company that decided to make a foray into the non-profit world.

That Grameen’s social business model works well in Bangladesh is beyond dispute. But, as Yunus made clear when I spoke with him last Saturday, things in his country are very different not only from those in a fully developed place like Canada but also from the situation in most other poor countries.

Its government is incompetent and corrupt but, despite this, Bangladesh is making steady progress in poverty alleviation. It’s enjoying astonishing economic growth (6.7 per cent a year) and is on track to meet most of its goals for poverty reduction and quality-of-life improvement.

How has it managed this?

It’s thanks to the competence, scale and scope of Bangladeshi non-governmental organizations, he said. And he wasn’t just tooting the Grameen horn but also giving credit to other groups that are national in their reach and powerfully effective.

They grew out of a tradition of weak governance, he said, and manage to compensate for it. They also manage to recruit the money and brainpower to make progress toward their lofty objectives.

Most other countries have no tradition of non-profits providing public goods on a national scale, but Yunus counts on finding the talent, goodwill and passion to invest in and run new social businesses, since “the machine of for-profit business doesn’t work very well when it comes to providing social benefits.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

He criticises ‘development’ and commends Dr. Yunus to Angela Merkel…

Peter Spiegel not only wrote the text but also organised Dr. Yunus’ tour through Germany in 2007. As General Secretary of the Global Economic Network, he also initiated the Vision Summit where Dr. Yunus obtained the first Vision Award.

Social Business is not only on top of the list of their ‘concepts for the future’ but will also be the topic for the second Vision Summit in the autumn 08 in Berlin. In preparation, a commission of seven delegates visited Grameen in Bangladesh in February.