Muhammad Yunus

Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi economist, banker and social entrepreneur whose pioneering of microcredit helped reshape thinking about poverty and the role of finance in development. Born in 1940 in Bathua, a village near Chittagong in what was then British India, he was the third of fourteen children of a Muslim jeweller and earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in economics at Dhaka University before winning a Fulbright scholarship to Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where he completed a doctorate in 1971.

Returning to a newly independent Bangladesh, he became head of the economics department at Chittagong University. The Bangladesh famine of 1974 pushed him out of the classroom and into the surrounding villages, where he discovered that families were trapped by usurers charging up to ten per cent a day on tiny working loans. He began lending small sums from his own pocket and in 1983 founded Grameen Bank, a fully chartered institution that issued unsecured loans to the rural poor, the great majority of them women.

By the early twenty-first century the bank had disbursed billions of dollars to millions of borrowers and had been replicated in scores of countries. In 2006 Yunus and Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.

After a brief political venture and a long dispute with the Awami League government that removed him from the bank in 2011, he was named chief adviser of Bangladesh's interim government in August 2024. He has written Banker to the Poor, Creating a World Without Poverty and A World of Three Zeros.

The name Muhammad is Arabic for praiseworthy and is the most widely given male name in the world. He has carried it through every chapter of his work.