Mention the Nobel Peace Prize and the names that come to mind are iconic–Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev and the like. They tend to be big players, powerful people who ran countries or global institutions. People for whom the prize is a ratification of what most of us already knew.
This year’s winner wasn’t on most Americans’ radar. Economist Muhammad Yunus hasn’t run an institution known well here. But his message ought to resonate deeply in this nation of strivers. Most Americans believe they just need a chance to climb the ladder of success.
That’s Yunus’ belief about his own countrymen and citizens of other impoverished lands. He invented the now-thriving industry of micro-lending 32 years ago by giving a chance to 42 female bamboo stool weavers in Bangladesh. He lent them the equivalent of $27. From that act came the bank he founded, Grameen Bank. It has since lent $5.7 billion to 6.6 million people and fostered myriad imitators around the world.
The idea was simple: Poor people have no money. Banks won’t lend to them because they have no collateral. But given the chance, poor people could be just as creditworthy as the rich. Grameen, which means “village” or “rural” in Bengali, requires no collateral. It relies on peer pressure. The bank lends to small groups of poor people, each of whom is responsible for the debt.
Yunus and Grameen deserved the Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee said, because they believe that “every single individual on Earth has both the potential and the right to live a decent life” and that “even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development.”
Think about the power of those sentiments: Every person has the potential–and can help himself or herself. Most big Western institutions, however sympathetic, see the world’s poor as unfortunate victims of forces beyond their control. Yunus sees them as he saw the makers of those bamboo stools–people capable of helping themselves who were trapped in a grinding cycle: They were paying a local moneylender usurious interest rates to borrow money for their raw materials. Yunus and Grameen allowed the women to cut out the moneylender, transforming their business–and their lives.
Don’t think this applies only to Third World countries. In a recent op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Yunus advocated micro-lending to help Katrina victims. Give them a hand up, not a handout, he wrote. That’s an American-sounding notion, courtesy of Bangladesh.
