22 October 2006
Younus deserves more than the Nobel
At the time when North Korea was
launching its first nuclear test and its dictator
Kim Jong-il was threatening world peace with such
a destructive device, Bangladeshi economist
and banker Mohammad Younus was celebrating
his winning of the world’s most
prestigious award for his role in saving
millions of people from poverty
and slavery.
The significance of the
coincidence is that while some
arrogant leaders such as Kim
have led their people to the edge of starvation
by allocating their
countries’ entire resources
to developing weapons of
mass destruction, figures like Younus
have dedicated their entire lives to the issue of economic and social development from below.
It was not surprising that the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize went
to Younus. The surprise was that a man like him had
not been awarded it earlier. Some were
surprised because he won the Nobel Prize for peace rather than
economics. But this must be viewed within
the Nobel Organization’s policy
in recent years of viewing efforts by activists to
help large population groups find ways
out of poverty as being
important for world peace and
stability as efforts by diplomats
and politicians to help end regional or global conflicts.
This
is exactly the issue towards which Younus has directed his efforts since the mid-1970s when he introduced
his notion of microcredit. The notion is simply
based on loaning tiny sums of money to poor people looking to escape poverty by starting businesses. It first came to Younus in 1974 when he bumped
into a woman weaving bamboo stools with calloused
fingers. He learned from her
that she could not make more than the equivalent
of US$ 0.02 per day, owning to the exploitation by a middleman from whom she borrowed
to buy bamboo. To Younus, this was
a kind of slavery that if she could
liberate herself from, her entire
life would be changed. Based on this finding, he
gave US$27 to some poor women, telling them to buy their
own materials and cut out the
middlemen and pay him back whenever
they could. Younus then sat
waiting for the result which was
as excellent as expected.
This
encouraged him to approach conventional banks for the adoption of his microcredit scheme. Faced by their refusal, he decided in 1976 to employ his varied
qualifications and experience
in establishing a unique bank
called the Grameen, which means village or rural in the
Bengali language.
Grameen, therefore, was the first bank
in the world to hand out unrestricted
small loans to poor people, who did not qualify for loans from conventional
banks. By doing this, it not only defied
conventional lending rules and helped
poor Bangladeshis start small businesses
that improved their social lives but also challenged cultural taboos in overwhelmingly Muslim Bangladesh by directing most of its loans
to women. The argument has
been that women spend their money more carefully and pay
back the loans in far higher percentage than men do.
According to Younus, Grameen with its over
2,200 branches in Bangladesh has so far loaned US$ 5.7 billion to 6.6 million Bangladeshis,
97 percent of whom were women. It has a 98 percent repayment rate compared with only 10 percent in the case of state-run industrial development banks which provide
loans against some form of guarantee.
More
important, however, was that the Grameen
Bank model has been duplicated
in more than 100 states, including
some developed countries like the United
States, something that has improved the lives
of nearly 95 million families.
It was said
that former US president
Bill Clinton had sought Younus’ assistance in introducing
the Grameen model to the state of Arkansas in the 1980s
when he was
the state’s governor.
Younus, the first Nobel Prize laureate from Bangladesh, represents the determination rooted in the people of this country, one of the poorest in the world despite a notable growth of its per capita
income from $280 in 1985 to
$440 in 2005. Born in 1940 in Chittagong to a father,
who had a jewellery business, Younus’ first sign of genius
was securing the 16th position among 39,000 students in the matriculation examination. Following his graduation in 1957 from Chittagong College, where he was
prominent in cultural activities,
he joined Dhaka University, from where he obtained
both his BA and MA degrees in economics. His high scores and unlimited ambition led him to wining a Fulbright scholarship to study at Vanderbilt
University, Tennessee, from
where he obtained his PhD
in economics in 1969. Younus
returned home in 1972 to join
Chittagong University as professor
of economics, but before that he had
worked for nearly 3 years as assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University.
To
conclude, a gifted man like Younus with
such high qualifications, magnificent records, and brilliant achievements should be given
a prominent role in running
his politically-divided
country, if not the top post.
*Academic researcher and lecturer on Asian affairs