A combination of a desire to help, an organized system, and a growing technology made Muhammad Yunusknown and appraised throughout the century due to his success in business industry. He is the father of microfinance in Bangladesh that brought much prosperity not only to the poorest class of the people but to the nation itself as well.
Turning Grameen into an arm of the state would jeopardize the bank's core mission by subjecting it to destabilizing political interference. And breaking it up would make its operations less efficient while eliminating it as an influential national organization that might challenge government policies.
His desire to help his poor people started when he observed the devastating effect of the famine and flood to some parts of the Bangladesh in 1974. That happened just three years after the Bangladesh Liberation War, which also resulted to the unstable government and nation. During this time, he observed that the poor, the laborers, and the non-landowners were the ones who were greatly affected. Even though there were many among them who had work, much of them were still had to take usurious loans to finance their small businesses. The traditional banks were also unwilling to lend these poor Bangladeshis due to fear of default.
These concerns led Muhammad Yunus to create the microfinance in Bangladesh. At first, he lent US $27 of his money to 42 women in the village, who in return made a profit of US $ 0.02 each on the loan. From that single beginning in 1976, microfinance grew into having 28,000 members in 1982. A full-fledged bank for the poor Bangladeshis, the Grameen Bank, was created. By July 2007, it supplied US $6.38 billion to 7.4 million borrowers.
Handling a growing company was not easy, especially for Muhammad Yunus. As what was really in demand at that time, he also used the technology to address the needs of his members in the microfinance and to reach out to those who are living farther.
In the last two years, the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has waged a destructive campaign against Grameen and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Her actions appear to be retaliation for Yunus' announcement in 2007 that he would seek public office, even though he never went through with his plans.
In 2011, her aides forced Yunus out of his job as managing director of the bank by arguing that he was older than a mandatory retirement age of 60, even though bank regulators had previously allowed him to stay in the job after he crossed that threshold. Since then, the government has started an investigation into the bank and is now planning to take over Grameen - a majority of whose shares are owned by its borrowers - and break it up into 19 regional lenders.
Although the microcredit model created by Yunus in the 1970s has lost some of its luster in recent years because of controversial practices by some lenders other than Grameen, the approach remains a vital tool for reducing poverty. It has helped millions of poor women start and sustain small businesses around the world and especially in Bangladesh, according to the World Bank.
A government-appointed commission studying Grameen Bank is expected to produce a report next week that recommends three different proposals, one of which would nationalize and break up the bank, according to local news reports. Some political analysts say that Hasina might not act on those recommendations until after the country votes for a new government at the end of the year to avoid giving the bank's many borrowers and employees a reason to campaign and vote against her.
Regardless of when the prime minister makes her decision, she has provided no compelling reason to dismantle one of the most promising credit movements to have benefited millions of women in her country.
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