My summary of Nobel Laureate Mohammed Yunus's lecture at the Global Education Summit at Presidency University on January 10, 2017..
1
Mohammed Yunus
Mohammed Yunus gave an incredibly inspirational talk at the end of which the entire audience at the Derozio Hall at Presidency University stood up to give him an ovation. It was well deserved. Professor Yunus has a personality that is rich and humane; he speaks from the heart. His commitment to the poor and needy of the world, particularly poor women who don’t get loans from banks, was unquestionable, lending each word he spoke a magnificent resonance. It was obvious to the audience that this man truly cared for those in need, and according to this writer, this wonderful humanity cast certain radiance around him.
Professor Yunus began by thanking the Vice Chancellor for inviting him to Presidency. He said there was no young person, male or female, in the two parts of Bengal (West Bengal and Bangladesh), who did not know the name of Presidency. He said that he had grown up hearing this name since it was especially associated with the great luminaries of Bengal.
He then went on to say that today the bank he started, is very big and has branches all over the world. However, when he started the work for it he had no grand plan, nor did he spend an incredible amount of effort on it. He referred to the famine of Bangladesh in 1974, as the starting point. He said that Bangladesh went downhill economically, after its independence in 1971. He said that he came back to Bangladesh from America, after it gained independence. He became a professor at Chittagong University, which was then a new one and set amidst very beautiful surroundings. He was happy teaching Economics, which is what he loved to do.
However when the famine hit the country in 1974, he felt very disillusioned with his own life and with the subject that he had invested so much time and effort in learning, because there were people who were suffering around him intensely, and he could do nothing about it. He entered a mode of ‘self-accusation’ that led him to ‘disown’ what he had learnt and ‘disown’ what he did. His restlessness made him go out into the villages that surrounded Chittagong University, wondering if he could even help one person then he would consider it worthwhile. The plight of Bangladesh’s 80000 villages was very bleak and distressing.
His repeated visits to the villages made him aware of how pervasive the phenomenon of loan sharking was in the villages of Bangladesh. The loan sharks lent out small sums of money and then proceeded to strangle the person who had borrowed money from him. He felt intensely humiliated that he could do nothing about this practice. He said that he now realizes that this is a pervasive phenomenon all over the world—there are loan sharks everywhere.
Professor Yunus said that he felt he had to do something. He wondered to himself as to why he didn’t lend the money out himself? He went on to say that he did not do this after having read many books, nor was it a research proposal. He felt his was just a response to the situation. He felt that he had to touch the lives of the people who were suffering so calamitously. And the effect was a good one. People were happy and he was happy too because he was being able to help people. This is what he had wanted to do.
2
He went on to say that he had no plan to open a bank. Yet these efforts at lending money that he made in 1976, eventually led to the opening of the Gramin Bank in 1983.
He said he has been locked in a perpetual fight with the banking system since then. He has told banks in Bangladesh that they are supposed to lend money to those who need it. Yet, they loan it out to those who already have a great deal of money. He has told the banks that they are destroying the lives of the people by not giving them loans. When banks say that such people are not ‘bank worthy’ he rebuts them by saying that they are not ‘people worthy’. He said that today they work in every single village of Bangladesh. There are one million borrowers and 90% of them are women.
Initially the work involved him in trouble with the men of the village. They said that Yunus was flouting religious norm by wanting to lend money to women. Whereupon Professor Yunus told them that their prophet had taken his first employment with a business woman and then eventually married her. On the lighter side Professor Yunus added that he told the men that in case they needed businesswomen brides, they could come to him! He said that it had been important to avoid religious tangles because they tend to make situations extremely murky.
Professor Yunus said that he always sent his female students to speak to the women of the village, and at one point they were so scared of his trying to cajole them to take money, that the minute his party entered the village, they would promptly run to the other side. However, he did not give up hope. He was a stubborn man and believed in his goal which was to create some economic lift for villagers who were desperately struggling against poverty.
He told his volunteers that the next time these women tell you that they don’t want the money; don’t believe them .Know that that is not their voice. The very day she is born, a girl grows up with the message that she is unwelcome. She lives a life like she doesn’t exist and now we are creating trouble for her by wanting to give her money. However, he told his students their job was to keep going. He fought with banks calling them out because they didn’t lend money to women. He thus made it a point that half his borrowers would only be women.
He reiterated that he knew nothing about banking. And he was happy that he didn’t. It allowed him to think and be creative. Professor Yunus’s advice was that if one doesn’t like something one must ‘jump it’. He said proudly that they now had a two billion dollar credit and 90 million borrowers, including in the U.S.A. where they had repeatedly told him that his system would not succeed. In 2008 he sent someone from Bangladesh who hadn’t ever been to the U.S. However he had been a bank manager. This person set up a branch of Gramin Bank at Jackson Heights and it is working fine. The Professor said that they now have 19 branches all over the U.S. and 8 in New York City, only.
He said that they lend money to those women there who may not have the right papers, who may not have the requisite legal status, but who want to survive. The whole Gramin Bank system he said is based on trust. He said that the women he loans money out to (perhaps speaking of Bangladesh in this context or may be others too), are often illiterate, yet, the bank
3
ensures that the children are not. This must be mainly Bangladesh that he is speaking of. Professor Yunus said that if these people were poor it was not their fault. It was not right to say that they were lazy. Civil society had not given them what was their right, either.
Professor Yunus went on to say that when the well-educated children of these women came up to him and said that there were no jobs in Bangladesh, he tells them jobs are an ‘obsolete’ idea which we should have left behind in the last century. He said did the cave man look for jobs? He said human beings were problem solvers, go getters and entrepreneurs—therefore it was this side of their nature that should be encouraged to develop. Human beings push frontiers and should be encouraged to do so. He tells them he said, that tell yourself that you are not a ‘job seeker’ but a ‘job creator’. ‘You are a complete human being’ and need not be at ‘the mercy of anyone’.
He feels that human beings are put in that derogatory position where they go around feeling dejected that they do not have jobs. He tells these young persons that your mother is part of Gramin Bank. It is her bank. So why don’t you go and help her with her business? He recapitulates how it is when the women first receive these loans of 30—35 dollars. They cannot believe that someone will give them that money. It is a trust that they therefore never break. These village women would then set up a business with her farm produce, goats, chickens and stays in business for 20 years.
In the beginning there were 5-10 proposals or applications from these children of original Gramin Bank loan takers. Professor Yunus said that a new fund was created for this new purpose and it was called Social Business Fund, so that it didn’t get mired in the rules of Gramin Bank. In Bangladesh now, 12000 young people are running business, and in 2017 there were 2000 applications. He tells them that they will be the ‘active’ partner whereas he will only be the ‘financial’ partner. If things succeed the young person gets the benefits, if it fails then it is our business that has failed.
He said that within the ‘capitalist system’, ‘wrong thinking had pulled us into the wrong direction’. Unemployment did not only exist in India and Bangladesh but was all over the world. He said that in Spain today unemployment is 48%, in Italy 40%, and in South Italy, 65%. He said with true commiseration what it must be for a young person to be without employment. He feels that the unlimited capacity of young people should be wasted through the fact of unemployment.
Professor Yunus said that the entire system needed to be re-hauled. Banking laws needed to be reframed so that poor people got some benefits out of it. He had told the Government of India that they should give ‘banking licenses’ to all N.G.O’s that were involved in microcredit. He said that he would soon be visiting a microcredit bank/N.G.O. in Bangalore that had benefitted from such a government loan.
Education needed to be re-hauled so that young people realized that along with ‘job’, ‘entrepreneurship’ was just as valuable. He said that he hated charity solutions. Instead he would make it an enterprise or business enterprise situation. For medical care he started health insurance. He told the village people that if you pay $4, I will cover your health
4
annually. He said that he then started a Pathology Lab, a Pharmacy and he was able to cover all his costs. He said his goal was not to earn money but to generate income.
When people said to him that this was not ‘business’ because it was not geared towards profit he said, that yes, money making or profit was important, but if he gained greater happiness in making other people happy then that could not be discounted as ‘profit’.
Trying to solve the lack of electricity in Bangladesh villages he introduced solar power and named it Gramin Shakti. People generally used kerosene. He told people that you give me the money you spend on kerosene and I will give you the solar cell. If it fails we will go back to using kerosene and you won’t have to give me any money back. It took him 18 years to convince the people, but now his company sell 1000 solar cells a year. 2 million houses use solar energy and business in it is very good and lot of young people are engaged in this business and solar energy cells are popular all over Bangladesh.
So over and over again, Professor Yunus urged social business. In response to a question he said, your N.G.O’s are usually local and regional. Ours are all national. When Bangladesh became independent it was a crisis that you have never known here. Our urgent need was to feed and clothe all the people of the country because the government itself was trying to find its feet. There were 1 crore of us in Kolkata when the war happened; we went back right after independence and plunged into this activity of maintaining the country on a day to day basis.
He further added that the capitalist system must go because statistics today proved that 99% of the world’s wealth was owned by 1% of the world; Wall Mart in America owned more wealth than the bottom 50% of America. All the wealth in the world was concentrated in about 6 countries. He said that this system either had to change or be restructured because it would definitely crash.
He said that his goals were three: A) Zero Poverty by 2030 B) Zero Unemployment by 2040 and C) Zero carbon emission by 2050.
To a reporter from Ananda Bazar who said that while ‘micro credit eases the situation’ it does not ‘eradicate or remove poverty’. She asked whether a PhD holder should take up ‘chicken rearing’ because he could not find a job? Professor Yunus replied that the PhD holder should open a ‘chicken farm’ because he would get a large loan from us. Our motto is that we stand by anyone who comes to us and we ensure that no one fails and if they do then it is ‘our failure’.
Professor Yunus received a standing ovation.
1
Mohammed Yunus
Mohammed Yunus gave an incredibly inspirational talk at the end of which the entire audience at the Derozio Hall at Presidency University stood up to give him an ovation. It was well deserved. Professor Yunus has a personality that is rich and humane; he speaks from the heart. His commitment to the poor and needy of the world, particularly poor women who don’t get loans from banks, was unquestionable, lending each word he spoke a magnificent resonance. It was obvious to the audience that this man truly cared for those in need, and according to this writer, this wonderful humanity cast certain radiance around him.
Professor Yunus began by thanking the Vice Chancellor for inviting him to Presidency. He said there was no young person, male or female, in the two parts of Bengal (West Bengal and Bangladesh), who did not know the name of Presidency. He said that he had grown up hearing this name since it was especially associated with the great luminaries of Bengal.
He then went on to say that today the bank he started, is very big and has branches all over the world. However, when he started the work for it he had no grand plan, nor did he spend an incredible amount of effort on it. He referred to the famine of Bangladesh in 1974, as the starting point. He said that Bangladesh went downhill economically, after its independence in 1971. He said that he came back to Bangladesh from America, after it gained independence. He became a professor at Chittagong University, which was then a new one and set amidst very beautiful surroundings. He was happy teaching Economics, which is what he loved to do.
However when the famine hit the country in 1974, he felt very disillusioned with his own life and with the subject that he had invested so much time and effort in learning, because there were people who were suffering around him intensely, and he could do nothing about it. He entered a mode of ‘self-accusation’ that led him to ‘disown’ what he had learnt and ‘disown’ what he did. His restlessness made him go out into the villages that surrounded Chittagong University, wondering if he could even help one person then he would consider it worthwhile. The plight of Bangladesh’s 80000 villages was very bleak and distressing.
His repeated visits to the villages made him aware of how pervasive the phenomenon of loan sharking was in the villages of Bangladesh. The loan sharks lent out small sums of money and then proceeded to strangle the person who had borrowed money from him. He felt intensely humiliated that he could do nothing about this practice. He said that he now realizes that this is a pervasive phenomenon all over the world—there are loan sharks everywhere.
Professor Yunus said that he felt he had to do something. He wondered to himself as to why he didn’t lend the money out himself? He went on to say that he did not do this after having read many books, nor was it a research proposal. He felt his was just a response to the situation. He felt that he had to touch the lives of the people who were suffering so calamitously. And the effect was a good one. People were happy and he was happy too because he was being able to help people. This is what he had wanted to do.
2
He went on to say that he had no plan to open a bank. Yet these efforts at lending money that he made in 1976, eventually led to the opening of the Gramin Bank in 1983.
He said he has been locked in a perpetual fight with the banking system since then. He has told banks in Bangladesh that they are supposed to lend money to those who need it. Yet, they loan it out to those who already have a great deal of money. He has told the banks that they are destroying the lives of the people by not giving them loans. When banks say that such people are not ‘bank worthy’ he rebuts them by saying that they are not ‘people worthy’. He said that today they work in every single village of Bangladesh. There are one million borrowers and 90% of them are women.
Initially the work involved him in trouble with the men of the village. They said that Yunus was flouting religious norm by wanting to lend money to women. Whereupon Professor Yunus told them that their prophet had taken his first employment with a business woman and then eventually married her. On the lighter side Professor Yunus added that he told the men that in case they needed businesswomen brides, they could come to him! He said that it had been important to avoid religious tangles because they tend to make situations extremely murky.
Professor Yunus said that he always sent his female students to speak to the women of the village, and at one point they were so scared of his trying to cajole them to take money, that the minute his party entered the village, they would promptly run to the other side. However, he did not give up hope. He was a stubborn man and believed in his goal which was to create some economic lift for villagers who were desperately struggling against poverty.
He told his volunteers that the next time these women tell you that they don’t want the money; don’t believe them .Know that that is not their voice. The very day she is born, a girl grows up with the message that she is unwelcome. She lives a life like she doesn’t exist and now we are creating trouble for her by wanting to give her money. However, he told his students their job was to keep going. He fought with banks calling them out because they didn’t lend money to women. He thus made it a point that half his borrowers would only be women.
He reiterated that he knew nothing about banking. And he was happy that he didn’t. It allowed him to think and be creative. Professor Yunus’s advice was that if one doesn’t like something one must ‘jump it’. He said proudly that they now had a two billion dollar credit and 90 million borrowers, including in the U.S.A. where they had repeatedly told him that his system would not succeed. In 2008 he sent someone from Bangladesh who hadn’t ever been to the U.S. However he had been a bank manager. This person set up a branch of Gramin Bank at Jackson Heights and it is working fine. The Professor said that they now have 19 branches all over the U.S. and 8 in New York City, only.
He said that they lend money to those women there who may not have the right papers, who may not have the requisite legal status, but who want to survive. The whole Gramin Bank system he said is based on trust. He said that the women he loans money out to (perhaps speaking of Bangladesh in this context or may be others too), are often illiterate, yet, the bank
3
ensures that the children are not. This must be mainly Bangladesh that he is speaking of. Professor Yunus said that if these people were poor it was not their fault. It was not right to say that they were lazy. Civil society had not given them what was their right, either.
Professor Yunus went on to say that when the well-educated children of these women came up to him and said that there were no jobs in Bangladesh, he tells them jobs are an ‘obsolete’ idea which we should have left behind in the last century. He said did the cave man look for jobs? He said human beings were problem solvers, go getters and entrepreneurs—therefore it was this side of their nature that should be encouraged to develop. Human beings push frontiers and should be encouraged to do so. He tells them he said, that tell yourself that you are not a ‘job seeker’ but a ‘job creator’. ‘You are a complete human being’ and need not be at ‘the mercy of anyone’.
He feels that human beings are put in that derogatory position where they go around feeling dejected that they do not have jobs. He tells these young persons that your mother is part of Gramin Bank. It is her bank. So why don’t you go and help her with her business? He recapitulates how it is when the women first receive these loans of 30—35 dollars. They cannot believe that someone will give them that money. It is a trust that they therefore never break. These village women would then set up a business with her farm produce, goats, chickens and stays in business for 20 years.
In the beginning there were 5-10 proposals or applications from these children of original Gramin Bank loan takers. Professor Yunus said that a new fund was created for this new purpose and it was called Social Business Fund, so that it didn’t get mired in the rules of Gramin Bank. In Bangladesh now, 12000 young people are running business, and in 2017 there were 2000 applications. He tells them that they will be the ‘active’ partner whereas he will only be the ‘financial’ partner. If things succeed the young person gets the benefits, if it fails then it is our business that has failed.
He said that within the ‘capitalist system’, ‘wrong thinking had pulled us into the wrong direction’. Unemployment did not only exist in India and Bangladesh but was all over the world. He said that in Spain today unemployment is 48%, in Italy 40%, and in South Italy, 65%. He said with true commiseration what it must be for a young person to be without employment. He feels that the unlimited capacity of young people should be wasted through the fact of unemployment.
Professor Yunus said that the entire system needed to be re-hauled. Banking laws needed to be reframed so that poor people got some benefits out of it. He had told the Government of India that they should give ‘banking licenses’ to all N.G.O’s that were involved in microcredit. He said that he would soon be visiting a microcredit bank/N.G.O. in Bangalore that had benefitted from such a government loan.
Education needed to be re-hauled so that young people realized that along with ‘job’, ‘entrepreneurship’ was just as valuable. He said that he hated charity solutions. Instead he would make it an enterprise or business enterprise situation. For medical care he started health insurance. He told the village people that if you pay $4, I will cover your health
4
annually. He said that he then started a Pathology Lab, a Pharmacy and he was able to cover all his costs. He said his goal was not to earn money but to generate income.
When people said to him that this was not ‘business’ because it was not geared towards profit he said, that yes, money making or profit was important, but if he gained greater happiness in making other people happy then that could not be discounted as ‘profit’.
Trying to solve the lack of electricity in Bangladesh villages he introduced solar power and named it Gramin Shakti. People generally used kerosene. He told people that you give me the money you spend on kerosene and I will give you the solar cell. If it fails we will go back to using kerosene and you won’t have to give me any money back. It took him 18 years to convince the people, but now his company sell 1000 solar cells a year. 2 million houses use solar energy and business in it is very good and lot of young people are engaged in this business and solar energy cells are popular all over Bangladesh.
So over and over again, Professor Yunus urged social business. In response to a question he said, your N.G.O’s are usually local and regional. Ours are all national. When Bangladesh became independent it was a crisis that you have never known here. Our urgent need was to feed and clothe all the people of the country because the government itself was trying to find its feet. There were 1 crore of us in Kolkata when the war happened; we went back right after independence and plunged into this activity of maintaining the country on a day to day basis.
He further added that the capitalist system must go because statistics today proved that 99% of the world’s wealth was owned by 1% of the world; Wall Mart in America owned more wealth than the bottom 50% of America. All the wealth in the world was concentrated in about 6 countries. He said that this system either had to change or be restructured because it would definitely crash.
He said that his goals were three: A) Zero Poverty by 2030 B) Zero Unemployment by 2040 and C) Zero carbon emission by 2050.
To a reporter from Ananda Bazar who said that while ‘micro credit eases the situation’ it does not ‘eradicate or remove poverty’. She asked whether a PhD holder should take up ‘chicken rearing’ because he could not find a job? Professor Yunus replied that the PhD holder should open a ‘chicken farm’ because he would get a large loan from us. Our motto is that we stand by anyone who comes to us and we ensure that no one fails and if they do then it is ‘our failure’.
Professor Yunus received a standing ovation.
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