OSLO, Norway - Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their pioneering use of tiny, seemingly insignificant loans — microcredit — to lift millions out of poverty.
Through Yunus's efforts and those of the bank he founded, poor people around the world, especially women, have been able to buy cows, a few chickens or the cell phone they desperately needed to get ahead.
The 65-year-old economist said he would use part of his share of the $1.4 million award money to create a company to make low-cost, high-nutrition food for the poor. The rest would go toward setting up an eye hospital for the poor in Bangladesh, he said.
[...]
Yunus told The Associated Press in a 2004 interview that his "eureka moment" came while chatting to a shy woman weaving bamboo stools with calloused fingers.
Sufia Begum was a 21-year-old villager and a mother of three when the economics professor met her in 1974 and asked her how much she earned. She replied that she borrowed about five taka (nine cents) from a middleman for the bamboo for each stool.
All but two cents of that went back to the lender.
"I thought to myself, my God, for five takas she has become a slave," Yunus said in the interview.
"I couldn't understand how she could be so poor when she was making such beautiful things," he said.
The following day, he and his students did a survey in the woman's village, Jobra, and discovered that 43 of the villagers owed a total of 856 taka (about $27).
"I couldn't take it anymore. I put the $27 out there and told them they could liberate themselves," he said, and pay him back whenever they could. The idea was to buy their own materials and cut out the middleman.
They all paid him back, day by day, over a year, and his spur-of-the-moment generosity grew into a full-fledged business concept that came to fruition with the founding of Grameen Bank in 1983.
Lue lisää:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15246216/
Through Yunus's efforts and those of the bank he founded, poor people around the world, especially women, have been able to buy cows, a few chickens or the cell phone they desperately needed to get ahead.
The 65-year-old economist said he would use part of his share of the $1.4 million award money to create a company to make low-cost, high-nutrition food for the poor. The rest would go toward setting up an eye hospital for the poor in Bangladesh, he said.
[...]
Yunus told The Associated Press in a 2004 interview that his "eureka moment" came while chatting to a shy woman weaving bamboo stools with calloused fingers.
Sufia Begum was a 21-year-old villager and a mother of three when the economics professor met her in 1974 and asked her how much she earned. She replied that she borrowed about five taka (nine cents) from a middleman for the bamboo for each stool.
All but two cents of that went back to the lender.
"I thought to myself, my God, for five takas she has become a slave," Yunus said in the interview.
"I couldn't understand how she could be so poor when she was making such beautiful things," he said.
The following day, he and his students did a survey in the woman's village, Jobra, and discovered that 43 of the villagers owed a total of 856 taka (about $27).
"I couldn't take it anymore. I put the $27 out there and told them they could liberate themselves," he said, and pay him back whenever they could. The idea was to buy their own materials and cut out the middleman.
They all paid him back, day by day, over a year, and his spur-of-the-moment generosity grew into a full-fledged business concept that came to fruition with the founding of Grameen Bank in 1983.
Lue lisää:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15246216/
Vastaukset 2
Vanhimmat
ihminen todellakin! Suomalaisena ja entisenä kristittynä, nykyisenä uskonnottomana nostan hänelle hattua.
Yunus kulkee vastavirtaan sillä yleinen asenne Bangladeshissa on, että rahat tulisi lainata miehille. Yunus on kuitenkin huomannut sen perustavaa laatua olevan tosiseikan, että naisille lainattu raha tulee koko perheen ja jopa yhteisön hyödyksi. Islamin ylistystä ei Yunusin toiminta suinkaan ole.
Earlier this month, Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his micro-credit program that has helped millions of Bangladesh's poor and has been duplicated around the world. In fact, in the last five years, three of the recipients of this prize have been Muslims, the other two being Mohammed Baradei (2005) and Shirin Ebadi (2003).
In addition, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk won this year's Nobel Prize in literature.
Media have described Yunus and Pamuk respectively as a “Bangladeshi economist.” and a “Turkish writer.” However, I have yet to hear Yunus described as “the Muslim economist” and Pamuk as the “Turkish Muslim writer.” Why are journalists and editors so quick to point to “Muslim terrorists” but hesitant to describe “Muslim Nobel Peace Prize winners?”
Of course, if the winners were Roman Catholic, Jewish or Buddhist, their religious affiliation would not be noted unless their work was related to their faith. But turning to the negative, why do we not speak of “Christian terrorists” (think of the Lord's Resistance Army of Sudan and Uganda) “Jewish terrorists,” (consider Baruch Goldstein, who murdered a group Muslims as they prayed in the month of Ramadan in 1994) or “Hindu terrorists” (remember the rape and mass murders in Gujurat, India in March 2002)? In all three cases, the individual or groups involved twisted their religious beliefs to commit their acts of terrorism.
'Not all Muslims are terrorists but most terrorists today are Muslim' is the common perception amongst many on the “American street,” but is this reality?
According to the National Counterterrorism Center's Report on Incidents of Terrorism 2005 (http://wits.nctc.gov/reports/crot2005nctcannexfinal.pdf), apart from Iraq, the country with the most terror fatalities was India. Some were inflicted by Muslims, but more were perpetrated by secessionist groups from the Northern provinces, the country's Communist Party, as well as various Hindu extremists. After India was Colombia, a country that is about 90 percent Roman Catholic, according to the CIA World Factbook.
And if we consider Iraq specifically, the vast majority of the victims of terrorism in that country were Iraqi Muslims themselves, not Americans or other religious or ethnic groups. In fact, the NCC report notes that last year, the world's biggest victims of terrorism were Muslims.
Closer to home, according to a study released in September by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research group at Syracuse University, in the eight months ending May 2006, Justice Executive Office of US Attorneys declined to prosecute more than nine out of every 10 terrorism cases sent to them by the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies. Nearly four in 10 of the rejected cases were scrapped because prosecutors found weak or insufficient evidence, no evidence of criminal intent or no evident federal crime. Lest we forget, Muslims have been the primary targets of terrorism-related law enforcement raids, arrests, etc. in the last five years.
Between Muslims who win the Nobel Peace Prize and Muslims who commit terrorism, you have ordinary Muslims. We are the people you work with, study with, teach, do business with, hand their change to at the grocery store or walk by on the street. Most of us will never win a Nobel Peace Prize. And almost none of us will ever commit terrorism. We are neither angels, nor devils. We must not be judged according to the best or the worst of our co-religionists. Nor should any religious or ethnic group.
http://onemuslimsmusings.blogspot.com/