NORWAY: Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus talks about his win and fighting global poverty

Professor Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank will on Sunday (December 10) receive the 2006 peace prize for their work to lift millions out of poverty by granting tiny loans of under $100 to the rural poor of Bangladesh, pioneering a global movement now known as microcredit. Yunus says he sees the prize as an opportunity to raise interests in this way of tackling global poverty. "So I am saying that if lending money to the poor people change their lives and you could do business, you know getting money back, cover all your costs. Why shouldn't we do more of that? This is one of the issues that we keep raising and that is something that we will continue to do." He also says the peace award was a big boost to his work by underscoring the link between eradicating poverty and a sustainable society. "In order to ensure peace you have to reduce poverty or eliminate poverty. So this is very clearly stated in the Nobel Peace Prize this year. And then the link between reduction of poverty and microcredits. People say that: "Well microcredits is good but we don't know if there is a link between poverty or not!" At least this is a statement that: "Yes there is a link between microcredits and the reduction of poverty!" The bank, which has 7 million clients in Bangladesh, is owned by its customers and counts 85,000 beggars among its members. It does not demand collateral, and almost no one defaults on their loans. "Grameen Bank has been working for thirty years now. We lend out nearly a billion dollar a year. An average loan in Bangladesh, in Grameen Bank, right now is 13o dollars. After all these years, after we have gone through stages and stages. What I'm trying to say is that 100 dollar is a lot of money for the person that we are talking about. The poor person." Yunus says a typical Grameen loan to a beggar would be around $12: "The reason why i hesitate to give charity money to a beggar is that it may insulate me from feeling that I have solved the problem. I get the feeling as if I have solved the problem. But I have not really solved the problem, I am just pushing away the problem by giving the money. So I would not rather give and worry about what makes her or him to come and ask for money and beg for me every day, every time. So go to the solution of it, the real solution of it. Not just the talking solution of it." He explains his view by saying that just because people are beggars it does not mean they don't have enough capacity to take care of themselves, rather they just have never had the opportunity. Grameen Bank has has since it's start faced problems from religious groups claiming the microcredit system's imbalance with islam. A problem that Yunus says has been largely solved, through dialogue. Today micro credit systems can be found in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Malaysia and Indonesia. All of them muslim countries. "It is lending money to the women which is causing the problem. They talk that by lending money to women, they will be coming out of the house and moving out to the market place which they thought, in there interpretation, was not what islam wanted them to do. So we said look, that is what you are assuming. If things happen in the way of your worst fears, you shouldn't be worrying about it but you should look at what is happening. People are taking their money and using their money to build their lives. Being in business and being a woman is nothing new is islam, in the old days even the prophet married a woman that was a business woman. So you should be happy that you can have an opportunity to marry a business woman yourself." Yunus says that his message to world leaders will be to urge them to get back to work to achieve the U.N. millennium goals to halve poverty by 2015.

ITN Source | December 10, 2006

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