Banker to the Poor Book Review
Banker to the Poor Book Review The book “Banker to the Poor” by Muhammad Yunus is the story of the Grameen Bank Program, which is founded in Bangladesh by Yunus to help the poor. Born in 1940 in the city of Chittagong, Professor Yunus studied at Dhaka University in Bangladesh, and then received a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Vanderbilt in 1969 and the following year became an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University. Returning to Bangladesh, Yunus became the head of the economics department at Chittagong University. Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983 with the hopes of helping poor people escape from poverty by providing them loans which no other bank would. With Grameen Bank, he pioneered microcredit and has created a new dimension for capitalism which he calls “Social Business”. (Yunus, Yunus Center, 2011) (Biography.com) Yunus had a dream of helping the poor people help themselves. While serving as the department head of Economic at Chittagong University, he began to get involved in the neighboring village, Jobra. The story of a woman named Sufiya in this village encouraged Yunus to help poor people which in a few years turned into the Grameen Bank. Sufiya was one of the forty-two women who worked all day to make bamboo stools. She had to barrow twenty-two cents from the middlemen to buy the raw materials she needed to make the stools. When she was done with the stools, she had to sell them back to the middlemen for a two cent profit. According to Yunus this was a miserable sum and he was shocked to discover this. He was frustrated that the course he taught at the school did not reflect this situation at all. In his words: “ In my university courses, I theorized about sums in millions of dollars, but here before my eyes the problems of life and death were posed in terms of pennies.” Yunus decided to distribute money to these villagers
Bibliography: Biography.com. (n.d.). Muhammad Yunus Biography. Retrieved 11 28, 2011, from Muhammad Yunus Biography: http://www.biography.com/people/muhammad-yunus-218222 Yunus, M. (1997). Banker to the Poor. New York: Persus Books Group. Yunus, M. (2010). Building Social Business. New York: PublicAffairs. Yunus, M. (2011). Yunus Center. Retrieved 11 28, 2011, from muhammadyunus.org: http://www.muhammadyunus.org