For the second year in a row, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate supported Full Circle Fund by addressing our community at our annual Forum. In honor of the new Global Economic Opportunity Circle Launch, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Dr. Muhammad Yunus spoke at a special reception of Full Circle Fund Forum guests. Dr. Yunus is widely regarded as the father of microfinance and continues to challenge conventional thinking and identify new ways to unleash the entrepreneurialism of the world’s poor.

Dr. Yunus spoke passionately to the guests about the importance of investing both time and money into social enterprises in developing regions. His talk can be seen by clicking here.

Dr. Yunus spoke passionately to the guests about the importance of investing in both time and money into social enterprises in developing regions.

“Philanthropy – the giving [money] away part is good; I’m not denying that. But if you can somehow manage to bring it to the social business level, what happens? Its power becomes multiplied several times. Because in philanthropy, you give the money, it goes, achieves its objective, but money never comes back. But if you can take that objective, build a social business around it, money recycles. It continues, it grows, and you learn and create an institution out of it, and it is replicable.”

After congratulating Full Circle Fund on its new Global Economic Opportunity Circle, he highlighted the positive impact individuals can have when using their time, talent and resources to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

“Funding is important, but at the same time when you personally can get involved with the business itself, in using your talent, your creativity, your connectivity to that business…and then you feel good that you have helped something which changes people’s lives in the world.”

The transcript of the text scrolls before your eyes as you listen, and the talk is organised into chapters as one is used to from reading books.

This value adding way of re-presenting talks is a technology that I appreciate greatly. May it add to the promotion of ‘social business’ as the most promising answer to the future of capitalism!

Presented with a great introductory text and all relevant links, it is the reward of the efforts of everybody involved in making it happen – Lilly, the 9 Yunus Ambassadors and the 20 Yunus Hosts – after 6181 hits on YunuSphere.

This effort that was only possible thanks to the magic of the net and the web! I can’t look at it for I’m in the ex-DDR without broadband. But even from here it’s a great way of expanding Dr. Yunus’ sphere of influence!

The one most relevant here is GapCast #5 – Bangladesh Miracle described below:

Have you heard about Miracle that has happened in Bangladesh over the last 30 years? No? In 1970 an average women in Bangladesh gave birth to 7 children, and one of four of them died before the age of five.

But after independence from Pakistan in 1971 things have improved. See Hans Roslings GapCast #5 to see how much.

Fascinating and really instructive. Some hard lessons for all of us, irrespective of the disciplines we practice as it shows how received wisdom can be so very wrong.

What one sees in the changes that have happened in Bangladesh over just 30 years should also be compared with his early look on the developments in Sweden over 300 years.

So, Bangladesh is a leading country in the world not just in population density but also in the speed and rate of reduction of child mortality. Grameen Bank and focus on micro-credits for women played clearly a very big part in this quiet and generally overlooked transformation. More startlingly, this transformation has not been fueled by a mad rush to urbanisation either.

Prof. Rosling is not surprised by this. As he says in another lecture, this time to an IT audience in Ireland in November 2007:

“Ignorance is not a problem, it is preconceived ideas. Otherwise the students (from a leading university in Sweden) would not score significantly worse on a comparison test (1.8 +/- 0.4) than the chimpanzee (2.5) guesses right!”