This morning I finished reading Muhammad Yunus’s book, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism.
He’s in my Top Five most influential people of the last half of the twentieth century. (By the way, who are your top five?)
Professor Yunus and the bank he started, Grameen Bank, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 because they brought at least 70 million families out of poverty in Bangladesh.
Yunus is an amazing practical visionary: a humble, but well-educated man, like Gandhi, whose leadership has change the world through small steps bravely taken, reasonably assessed, and then brilliantly implemented—toward a huge goal: ending poverty as we know it on planet Earth.
The book most-readably details the realizations he had in the 1970s, when as an economist he observed that there existed a huge population of people who were outside the boundaries of what was considered normal economic activity: poor women in their homes in small villages, the urban poor, beggars.
He, a Muslim man, began studying the lives of these poor women, especially, asking questions, and discovering that no matter how hard they worked, they were outside the financial system and thus could never leverage their labor and ideas sufficiently to get out of poverty.
To make a 30-year long story short: he started a microloan bank for villager. He turned the rules upside down: he loaned money without asking for collateral; he loaned to the illiterate; he loaned almost exclusively to women, and in very small amounts; he insisted on repayment and worked with them to assist that happening; he helped them form support groups; he established certain principles that borrowers had to adapts (like growing vegetables, keeping their housing repaired, sending their children to school…).
And all the while, he developed and tested a new economic theory, built not on profit-making but on people’s innate desire to do good, to help: he’s called it social business.
A social business is a full-fledged entrepreneurial business, absolutely designed to make money. However, investors do not get the profits: after they are repaid their investment, the profits are plowed back into the company to continue doing good. It’s a non-loss, non-dividend arrangement for investors.
Yunus is a trained scholar, an active researcher, an eloquent speaker, an excellent thinker and clear writer, an inventor, a theoretician, a father, a man who has held fast to an extraordinary impossible vision to the point where it has been created.
In the final chapter of Creating a World Without Poverty, he pushes the envelope even more. He itemizes his dream for 2050, for what he thinks is possible if we collectively develop the will to create it. I read his vision-list with my mouth open and my stomach in knots. It’s impossible: no poor people anywhere; no passports; one global currency; state-of-the-art technology available universally; no use for paper so no trees wasted; simultaneous language translation for everyone; sun, water, and wind as the main sources of power, and much more. No way, I thought.
But he wants the rest of us to develop such vision lists. He just doesn’t take “impossible!” for an answer.
He sees his vision manifesting through individuals taking action. He recommends forming “social action forums” that could be as small as three people, focused on a single local concern, like how they can help one dropout get back into school. Or these social action forums could be large enough to form true social businesses.
He’s developed a website to start to coordinate these social action forums: http://yunusuni.com/id2.html. It seems to be kind of rough still, but definitely there.
So in the end it gets down to us, to me. Hmm. That’s totally scary. But…
I’d like to form a social action forum around parenting education and family literacy. I’ve actually been working on that issue for some time now, and you can see one of the ways I think could help address it at the website of my new book: http://plusitbook.com.
Anyone interested in further talk about this?
