The Ideal Global Citizen                                 

Do you know the name of Dr. Muhammad Yunus?  He and his Grameen Bank got the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Muhammad is the very man who creates economic and social development among poor people. The poverty is a problem in the world. I think Dr. Muhammad Yunus is an ideal cosmopolitan today because he has begun to put in serious efforts to tackle global poverty.

It is said that confronting and solving poverty is a way of global peace, because most terrorists come from the poorer families. They always complain about their government their societies and their own future. When their radical opinions are neglected by their society, they make groups to practice their demands in their own way. This becomes a reason for civil guerrilla wars to starts.

As a Bangladesh banker and economist, Dr. Muhammad Yunus made a speech at the Harvard Business School. He said that the poor people do not create poverty. So I don’t take the crass conventional view that they are lazy, don’t have the skills, or don’t have the drive. It isn’t their fault. They are not the creators of poverty. Poverty is created by the system that we built. The poor have as much as energy, as much creativity as any human being on this planet. It’s all about unleashing energy. So that we should find a way to give poor people an opportunity to realize their full humanity. Give the poor the same opportunity you had, and watch the miracle unfold.

Ordinary bankers never lend money to the poor especially to women who have not jobs. On the contrary, Yunus’ original and utterly subversive plan was to lend lots of small amounts to the poor women with no collateral on the basis of trust, not legal contracts. He believes the small amount of money going through the women brings so much benefit to the family.  The man’s priorities are different, he wants to enjoy himself outside the home, show off to his friends. For a woman, it starts with her children and the household.

Here is an example of this scheme at work.

A woman had applied for an initial loan of some 3,000 taka (about $35) and with that she built up stock for a rudimentary grocery shop, or financed the purchase of a wooden handloom, or bought a cow, or rented a section of a rice field. She converted the loan into profit, paid back the money to the bank at an interest of 20per cent, and then obtained a loan of 5,000 taka, with that she expanded her small business a bit more, met the repayment- usually weekly or fortnightly – and took out a bigger loan, this time maybe to build a house, in which case she received a lower interest rate of eight per cent. In time she also opened a saving account, and then maybe obtained a student loan at five per cent interest rate to help her children make it to university.

The success of the Grameen model has inspired similar efforts throughout the developing world and even in industrialized nations, including the United States. The Grameen model of micro financing has been emulated in 23 countries. Lending money specifically to women who suffer disproportionately from poverty and who are more likely than men to devote their earnings to their families is becoming a big business in the world now. 　            

Don’t you think Dr. Yunus is an ideal cosmopolitan? 　　　　　　　　　　　　　Satomi Oka