A success story that started with $27. Genius.

Too many people I have talked to recently don’t know about this and it is a story that has marveled me for years now. Let me share.

It all began with a gentleman named Muhammad Yunus lending out $27 out of his own pocket to a group of poor craftsmen in the nearby town of Jobra in Bangladesh. To magnify the impact of that small sum, Yunus himself volunteered to serve as guarantor on a larger loan from a traditional bank. This gave birth to what we call micro-lending. Essentially, it is lending tiny amounts of money to the poor, thus breaking the cycle of poverty. Think about it yourself. When you see a poor person, you naturally empathize with them and pull out a $5 bill and hand it over to them and forget about poverty all together. Yunus didn’t give charity. He gave a loan of $27. When was this loan due?  ”Whenever.” Interests? No. “I’m not in the money business”, he chimed.

It never occurred to the now nobel-prize winner Yunus that his thoughtful gesture would inspire an entire revolution of lending.  You have to read his book through his words. Here is a portion of it from Google Books.  Being so close to graduation, everybody asks me what my status is on my job search. To those reading, my friends, this is the type of business I want to do. Social business. Like Yunus, I don’t want to be in the money business either.

Related articles

• ‘To Catch A Dollar’ Documents Success Of Bank For Poor (huffingtonpost.com)
• A success story that started with $27. Genius. (amenaskhan.wordpress.com)
• Film: Grameen Bank for the poor helps US women (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Film: Grameen Bank for the Poor Helps US Women (abcnews.go.com)
• Social Business (avicenna2020.wordpress.com)
• Nobel winner Yunus promotes social business (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library Hosts ‘Father of Micro-Credit’ and Nobel Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus (prweb.com)
• Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus Joins mHealth Alliance Board (prweb.com)
• Meeting with Dr Muhammad Yunus (shanshaxuan.wordpress.com)
• Mitchell J. Rabin: Helping Women Help Themselves Around the World With Micro-Credit: Grameen Bank in Action (huffingtonpost.com)