Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle against World Poverty »

Muhammad Yunus was born in 1940 in Chittagong, a seaport in Bangladesh. The third of fourteen children, five of whom died in infancy, he was educated at Dhaka University and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University. In 1972 he became the head of the economics department at Chittagong University. He is the founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank.

The simple idea of micro-loans is revolutionizing developing economies. Instead of lending large sums of money to often corrupt bureaucracies, economist Muhammad Yunus founded Grameen Bank to offer tiny sums, as little as $5, to individual craftspeople, tenant farmers, and subsistence entrepreneurs so they could keep themselves afloat between buying and selling. That was in 1983. Sixteen years later, with $2.5 billion being dispersed annually to more than two million families in rural Bangladesh and repayment rates close to 100 percent, Yunus is being hailed as the father of a new economic model that is bringing people out of poverty. In Banker to the Poor, Yunus explains why his program works.

Gracious Rants

An interesting story of beginning and hope . . . I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the problem of poverty . . .