Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunusis a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, banker, economist, and civil society leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. These loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. In 2006, Yunus and the Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts through microcredit to create economic and social development from below". The Norwegian Nobel Committee said that "lasting...
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth28 June 1940
CityChittagong, Bangladesh
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What we are trying to do is to create a social business in Bangladesh, a joint venture to create restaurants for common people. Good, healthy food at affordable prices so that people don't have to opt for food that is unhealthy and unhygienic.
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I dismiss personal profit and focus exclusively on people and planet. That's what I call social business: a nondividend company dedicated to solving human problems. You can go all the way, forgetting about personal profit, being single-minded about solving problems. The company makes profit, but profit stays with the company.
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By simply capitalizing on core strengths and knowledge, companies and entrepreneurs can engage in an emerging business model that will enable them to create - and demonstrate - real, sustainable social impact in society.
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To overcome poverty and the flaws of the economic crisis in our society, we need to envision our social life. We have to free our mind, imagine what has never happened before and write social fiction. We need to imagine things to make them happen. If you don't imagine, it will never happen.
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What we need is to think strategically about development, analyzing a country's potential role in its region and the world in search of opportunities for growth. Platforms like the Global Social Business Summit can facilitate the process on bringing about change.
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Engaging in social business is beneficial to a company because it leverages on business competencies to address social issues, involves one-time investment with sustainable results, and produces other positive effects such as employee motivation and improved organizational culture.
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Peace should be understood in a human way - in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.
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A charity dollar has only one life; a Social Business dollar can be invested over and over again.
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They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.
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I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.
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Human beings are much bigger than just making money.
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I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in which I was working in Bangladesh.
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Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in.
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Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.