Yunus, Muhammad (1940- )

Bangladeshi economist and banker, pioneer of microcredit financial services to the poor, and joint winner with his Grameen Bank of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for helping to alleviate poverty. His initiative has created a category of banking that provides millions of small loans to rural people with no collateral who are too poor to qualify for traditional bank finance.

He has served on various United Nations advisory bodies, committees and commissions on developmental issues, and on the boards of international organizations dealing with development programmes. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2006 reflected his ‘efforts to create economic and social benefit from below’.

Born into a prosperous family in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), he went to school at Chittagong Collegiate College and then studied economics at Dhaka University. Subsequently, as a Fulbright scholar at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, he earned a doctorate in economics in 1969. In 1972, after teaching in Tennessee, he returned to Bangladesh, joining Chittagong University as an economics professor.

From this time he developed his innovative ideas for promoting financial services for the poor, coupling capitalism with social responsibility and focusing predominantly on women(despite Bangladesh's traditional Muslim society). This culminated in the action research project which would evolve into the independent Grameen Bank from the early 1980s.