If you are born into a poor family, if you are a woman you have seen the worst of poverty. In acultural way in thefamilies in Bangladesh it's thewomen who eats last. So if you have ascarcity in the family … she misses out so everything comes in the raw deal for her. So, given a chance she works very hard to make a change to improve her life. And by training she is the most efficient manager of scarce resources. Because with the little resource she has, she has to stretch it as much as she can to look after the children, look after the family and everything else..unlike men - men want to enjoy right away. Whatever he got, whatever tiny bit of thing he got he doesn't care for much what's coming up.
"Interview with Prof. Muhammad Yunus" Australian Broadcasting Corporation (25 March 1997)
'I believe that "government", as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement andjustice, national defense andforeign policy, and let the private sector, a "Grameenized private sector", a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions.'
Autobiography : Banker to the Poor (2001)
To me poor people are like bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a flower-pot, you get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted, only the soil-base that is too inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong in their seeds. Simply, society never gave them the base to grow on. All it needs to get the poor people out of poverty for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly.
Creating a World without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism (2007)
Poor people always pay back their loans. It's us, the creators of institutions and rules, who keep creating trouble for them.
Grameen Bank II: Designed to Open New Possibilities (2002)
The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world — all we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them.
Poverty has been created by theeconomic andsocial system that we have designed for the world. It is the institutions that we have built, and feel so proud of, which created poverty.
"Eliminating Poverty Through Market-Based Social Entrepreneurship" inGlobal Urban Development Magazine (May 2005)
I will not spend the money for myself. I will rather spend it in special business on a no-profit-no-loss policy. We will also establish an eye hospital where even beggars will be given treatment at the cost of Taka 10-20.
The Daily Star (14 October 2006)
We will make yogurt with all kinds of nutritious elements. We want to provide nutrition to the poor and children.
The Daily Star (14 October 2006)
All human beings have an innate skill — survival skill. The fact that poor are still alive is a proof of their ability to survive. We do not need to teach them how to survive. They know this already.
Always remember, job is a wrong idea. Don't ever look for a job, always tell yourself that I'm a job creator. I'm not a job seeker, I'm a job creator. So be a job creator.
What happens to the rest of the world? It’s as if the rest of the world will be forgotten... This is avaccine that is needed by 8 billion people. What happens to poor people? What happens to poor countries who cannot afford to pay the prices that they’ll be charging in the rich countries? With social business, shareholders don’t want to make any profit out of it so no dividend is taken from the company and we can reduce the cost and produce anywhere.
I believe that, ultimately, the only way to definitively eradicate thepandemic is to have avaccine that can be administered to all inhabitants of the planet... The effectiveness of the upcomingvaccination campaign will depend on its universality. To ensure the availability of the vaccines to all people on the planet almost at the same time, it has to be free from ownership. To do so we intend to make a globalpharmaceutical social business operational as soon as possible. I am looking for partners to help us achieve this goal... It has to be freed from commercial interest. The polio vaccine was declared as a common good, not owned by anybody. Why not (have) the corona vaccine follow the same path?
To overcomepoverty and the flaws of the economic crisis in our society, we need to envision our social life. We have to free ourmind,imagine what has never happened before and write social fiction. We need to imagine things to make them happen. If you don't imagine, it will never happen.
The directelimination of poverty should be the objective of alldevelopment aid. Development should be viewed as a human rights issue, not as a question of simply increasing the gross national productGNP.
Abu Sayed is no longer a member of just one family. He is the child of all families in Bangladesh. The children who will grow up and attend school and college will know about Abu Sayed and will say to themselves, 'I too will fight for justice.' Abu Sayed is now in every home.
The Daily Star (10 August 2024)
NGOs are a force. We must realize the dreams of our youth.
Meeting at the Chief Adviser’s residence (24 August 2024)
You cannot change the world in a day...if you want to change, start from your village.
Making money from business is happiness, but making other people happy is super happiness.
10 April 2025, in Bangladesh Investment Summit-2025 at Hotel Intercontinental[2]
... culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.
A WORD FROM NOBEL LAUREATE MUHAMMAD YUNUS: (in video) Thank you so much for clicking on me. I am Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, and, oh yeah, I'm also the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. To find an entrepreneur you want to lend to, click on my nose... if you can catch it. It's up here! Now down here! Too slow! Okay, I'll hold still. No, I won't. Ha-ha! Good-bye!
Nobel peace laureateDesmond Tutu and actorGeorge Clooney are among more than 100 people who have signed an appeal for COVID-19 vaccines to be declared a global common good and made widely available. The appeal is led by the founder of the microcredit movement Muhammad Yunus, also a Nobel peace prize winner, who said some pharmaceutical companies had declared vaccines would be provided to rich countries inEurope and theUnited States first. There is currently no vaccine against COVID-19, but more than 100 are in development around the world as drugmakers race to combat the pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 people globally. Yunus said he was also planning to create an open-source company to produce vaccines around the world and was open to discussion with governments and pharmaceutical companies on how to set it up.
The only way to contain the coronavirus pandemic is to have COVID-19 vaccines free from commercial interests, Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus toldArab News in an exclusive interview, as over 100 statesmen, academics, activists and religious leaders joined his campaign to declare coronavirus vaccines a global common good... Vaccine research requires huge investments and many laboratories in the private sector are engaged in it. Yunus urged theWorld Health Organization (WHO) to design an action plan to put the vaccine into the public domain....
The “Declare COVID-19 Vaccine a Global Common Good Now” campaign launched by Yunus on Sunday has already gained the support of 19Nobel Prize laureates, includingArchbishop Desmond Tutu,Malala Yousafzai,Iranian political activist and lawyerShirin Ebadi,Poland’s first democratically elected presidentLech Walesa,Britishmolecular biologist SirRichard John Roberts, and formerSoviet Union presidentMikhail Gorbachev. Yunus said he was expecting a huge response from global leaders to ensure that, in the case of a COVID-19 vaccine, there would be consensus for free universal access. He warned that this would not happen as long as the vaccine remained a commercial product owned by companies... As of Friday (3 July 2020), 112 former presidents, prime ministers, business leaders, artists and social activists joined his mission. Everyone can support the initiative through the website www.vaccinecommongood.org.
Muhammad Yunus has shown himself to be a leader who has managed to translate visions into practical action for the benefit of millions of people, not only in Bangladesh, but also in many other countries. Loans to poor people without any financial security had appeared to be an impossible idea. From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed micro-credit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty.
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