Midwinter Monday: Muhammad Yunus on Defeating Poverty

 Could ALA President Jim Rettig have picked a better speaker for this Midwinter  President’s Program than Muhammad Yunus? I don't think so. With American capitalism failing at numerous levels, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty told the amazing story of his crusade to end world poverty with a lending system that defies the traditional notion of how banks do business. Yunus started his talk by admitting that he had learned a lot about the American Library Association following the invitation to speak—first that it existed, and second that it could be so large. If you doubt that we have plenty more public-awareness raising to do, consider Yunus’s remark that “now I see what my project and libraries have in common.” He went on to explain how his Grameen Bank evolved in Bangladesh. Of poverty, he said, “The problem is difficult but the solution is simple.” “A sense of uselessness grips you,” Yunus said, describing his conversion from a student of economics to a force for social and economic change. “Let’s forget about the study of economics,” he said. “Why don’t I go to the people and see if I can make myself useful to them?” From this epiphany, came the concept of micro-loans. Yunus realized that poverty-stricken villagers were turning to loan sharks for money. He calculated that 42 people owing a loan shark $27 meant that so many people “had to suffer so much for so little; if I could give the $27, I could solve the problem for the people, and that is what I did.” Yunus’s initial gift of $27 led to the founding of the Grameen (it means “village,” he said) Bank, which today makes loans to more than six million families on the basic premise that if you pay the money back, you get more money. The business of business is making money, said Yunus, but human beings are multidimentional and not only about making money. But charity is not the answer, he warned, because money given through charity never comes back. Yunus’s onstage monologue included some compelling and moving comments about how he defied conventional capitalist wisdom, with the philosophy that “rules are made to be changed”: On the fact that many women said the loans should go to their husbands, not to them, he said, “This is not her voice; this is the voice of the history that created her.” On what he has been advised to do, he said, “I do the opposite, and it works.” “Poverty is not created by poor people, poverty is created by the system, the way we build it," Yunus said. "All human beings are packed with unlimited potential.” Yunus said with conviction that he foresaw a time when we would have to creat "poverty museums" so people could understand what had once been widespread. Rettig noted that libraries make micro-loans—gifts really—of knowledge that help people transform their lives, improve their well-being, and literally develop their local economies. There had to have been at least a thousand people in the audience, and they spontaneously leaped to their feet with approval at the end of Yunus's talk. While there remains much to be done, the bottom line, so to speak, for Yunus is that his system works and he has proven it.