Muhammad Yunus

Muhammad Yunus

Muhammad Yunus, an economist from one of the world’s poorest nations, won the Nobel Peace Prize in October of 2006 along with the institution he founded, Grameen Bank. Yunus established this “Bank of the Villages” in 1983 to provide what are known as microloans to those who otherwise had no access to credit or capital. “Poverty is not created by the poor,” he explained to John Carlin, a writer for the London Observer. “So I don’t take the crass conventional view that they are lazy, don’t have the skills, and don’t have the drive. It is not their fault. They are not the creators of poverty. Poverty is created by the system that we built. The poor have as much energy, as much creativity as any human being on this planet.”  Yunus was born in 1940 in Chittagong, a seaport city on the Karnaphuli River near the Bay of Bengal. At the time of his birth, the city and surrounding Chittagong District were part of India, which was still under British rule. Yunus spent his earliest years in a village called Bathua, and his family eventually moved to Chittagong proper, where his father had a jewelry business. As a youth, he was active in the Boy Scouts organization, and even traveled to Canada for the 1955 World Scouts Jamboree. Back home at Chittagong Collegiate School, he was a top student, and went on to Chittagong College and then Dhaka University, which took its name from the city of the same name that would later become the capital of Bangladesh. Yunus earned his undergraduate degree in economics in 1960, and his master’s degree a year later from Dhaka University. He took a government job as a research assistant with the country’s Bureau of Economics before moving to the United States to pursue a doctorate in his field from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. While there, he married a fellow student, and they had a daughter together. Between 1969 and 1972 he taught economic courses at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Ethnic and religious tensions had simmered in southwest Asia since the end of British colonial rule in 1947. The Chittagong area became part of what was known as East Pakistan, one of two separate territories that divided the once-powerful kingdom of Bengal along religious lines. Disagreements between all sides continued, and a 1971 civil war ended with independence for East Pakistan, which renamed itself Bangladesh, a word that meant “Country of Bengal.” Sensing a new era for his homeland, Yunus was eager to return, but his wife objected to moving there with a young child, and the pair divorced.