posted October 13, 2006 04:42 PM              

Bangladeshi Professor Muhammad Yunus, the microcredit guru, greets colleagues before meeting journalists upon learning he won the 2006 Noble Peace Prize, outside his residence at Mirpur, Dhaka on Friday 13 October 2006. EPA/ABIR ABDULLAH

Oslo - In a surprise move, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006 was awarded to Muhammad Yunus, the 66-year-old Bangladeshi behind the Grameen Movement micro-banking system that has helped millions in his homeland, it was announced Friday in Oslo.

Yunus jointly shared the award, worth 10 million kronor (1.37 million dollars), with the non-profit Grameen Bank, which means 'rural bank' in Bengali. **(I read that he plans on giving all the money away to a good cause)**

The five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee cited Yunus and Grameen Bank 'for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.'

The committee underlined that 'lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights.'

The bank was created in 1976, and has focused on offering credits to the poor - nine in 10 of whom are women - and has since spread to some 100 countries worldwide.

'I am absolutely delighted, I can't believe it has really happened,' Yunus told Norwegian broadcaster NRK. 'I am so happy,' Yunus said, saying the prize was a dream and it was 'fantastic news.'

The award would give more energy in the struggle to create a 'poverty-free world,' Yunus said, adding some 100 million families had benefited from the microcredit system.

By 2015, the target date for the so called Millenium Development Goals, the aim was to boost the number to 175 million, Yunus said.

'The poorest get loans, this has to do with human rights and human dignity,' committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjos said. 'We wish to send a signal to the whole world that the fight against poverty is the most important thing.'

The Grameen Movement has also evolved spin-offs including Grameen Phone, which is majority-owned by Norwegian telecoms group Telenor.

It has introduced a village handset where a villager, often a woman, buys a handset with a small loan from Grameen Bank. The loan is repaid by renting out the handset on a per-minute basis to other villagers.

Norwegian politicians including Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and International Development Minister Erik Solheim welcomed the choice, as well as the Nobel committee's moves in recent years to broaden the concept of peace.

That was signalled with the 2004 choice of Kenyan human rights activists and environmentalist Wangari Maathai, who was cited for 'her contribution to sustainable development.'

Yunus had not figured in speculation where favourites this year included former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari who helped broker a peace deal in Aceh, and exiled Chinese human rights activist Rebiya Kadeer of the Uighur ethnic minority.

The prize is presented on December 10, the anniversary of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel's death. Yunus said he planned to attend the ceremony in Oslo.

The announcement caps this year's announcements of the Nobel prizes endowed by Swedish dynamite inventor Nobel.

At the time of Nobel's 1896 death, Sweden and Norway were a union, explaining why the science and literature prizes are awarded in Stockholm and the peace prize is awarded in Oslo.

On Thursday, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was awarded the literature prize. Last week, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello were awarded the medicine prize, fellow Americans John Mather and George Smoot shared the physics prize and Roger Kornberg was awarded the chemistry prize.

New York-based professor Edmund Phelps of Columbia University on Monday improved the US record when he was awarded the economics prize, a prize that was not mentioned in Nobel's will.

The 2005 peace prize was shared by the UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency and its head, Mohamed ElBaradei, for efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes.

© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/southasia/article_12109 25.php/Bangladesh_microbanker_Yunus_wins_Nobel_Peace_Prize

Profile: Mohammad Yunus, the modest 'banker of the poor'

New Delhi/Dhaka - Mohammad Yunus has established a worldwide reputation as being the modest 'banker of the poor.' His admirers - besides those in his poverty-stricken Bangladesh itself for whom Yunus is making possible a decent life - include such prominent persons as former US President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary.

For years now Yunus had been regarded as a potential recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, but now, in a complete surprise, he has been named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The 66-year-old's ambitious aim in life is to conquer poverty in the world.

'One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like,' Yunus once said in an interview in the Independent on Sunday newspaper.

His recipe is at once simple and brilliant: His Grameen Bank - which was named as co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize - provides small loans to the needy, almost all of them women.

The bank demands no collateral. The interest rates are much lower than those demanded by the sharks to whom the poor previously had to turn to, since without any collateral they would not qualify for regular bank loans.

'Poverty covers people in a thick crust and makes the poor appear stupid and without initiative,' Yunus said. 'Yet if you give them credit, they will slowly come back to life.'

Instead of becoming the 'good banker' in his home country, Yunus could have embarked on a typical career and become a successful businessman. Born 1940 in Chittagong, Bangladesh's chief commercial hub, he was the son of a goldsmith who enabled him to get a good education. But it was his mother who especially influenced him

'Mother always helped any poor who knocked on our door,' Yunus said.

Yunus received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United States and at the conclusion of his studies he returned to Bangladesh as a professor of economics at Chittagong University. He was 33.

But Yunus could not avert his eyes from the increasing poverty in his country which had just gained its independence. 'While people were dying of hunger on the streets, I was teaching elegant theories of economics.

'I started hating myself for the arrogance of pretending I had answers. We university professors were all so intelligent, but we knew absolutely nothing about the poverty surrounding us.'

From such a realization, Yunus drew one conclusion: 'I decided that the poor themselves would be my teachers. I began to study them and question them on their lives.'

In the mid-1970s Yunus and his students would visit a poor village several times and see how private loan sharks with their exorbitant interest rates prevented the people from rising out of poverty.

'Their poverty was not a personal problem due to laziness or lack of intelligence, but a structural one: lack of capital,' Yunus recalled in the Independent on Sunday newspaper story. It was the existing system which prevented the poor from being unable to save money and invest in improving their own lot.

And so the idea of a bank providing small-size credits at fair conditions was born.

At first, Yunus was laughed at. Bankers did not regard the poor as being creditworthy. But Yunus argued back: 'How do you know they are not creditworthy if you've never tried? Perhaps it is the banks that are not people-worthy?'

In 1983 his Grameen Bank - which means 'rural bank' in Bengali - became licensed. As of mid-2005 the Grameen Bank had loaned upwards of 5 billion dollars to to poor. And the sceptics have been silenced - 99 per cent of the loans have been repaid.

Yunus' idea has in the meantime found imitators in more than 60 developing countries.

'I invite everyone to steal my idea,' the former professor told the German radio network ARD last year. 'It's a great idea, everyone should do it. My only complaint is that a lot more people haven't yet taken up the idea and put it to use.'

posted October 16, 2006 01:58 PM            

That's awesome!! Really great work!