The business story
Born in Chittagong in 1940; PhD in economics from Vanderbilt (1969). After the 1974 famine he began lending tiny sums to the rural poor in Jobra, formalising the model as Grameen Bank in 1983. Won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Removed from Grameen Bank in 2011 and prosecuted under Sheikh Hasina; after Hasina’s 2024 ouster he became Chief Adviser of the interim government (2024–2026).
Early life and background
Muhammad Yunus was born on 28 June 1940 in the Chittagong region, then part of British India and now Bangladesh, the son of a jeweller in a relatively comfortable household. He took a BA and MA in economics at the University of Dhaka, then a Fulbright scholarship to Vanderbilt University, where he completed his PhD in 1969. In the early 1970s he returned to the newly independent Bangladesh to lead the economics department at Chittagong University.
The 1974 famine broke his confidence in classroom theory. He started spending time in Jobra, the village beside the campus, to understand poverty first-hand. There he found women who made bamboo stools held back by small debts to moneylenders whose terms left them almost nothing. Freeing 42 villagers from that trap took about 27 US dollars. He lent it personally, and it came back.
Building Grameen Bank
That experiment became a method: very small, collateral-free loans, mostly to women, delivered through small groups of borrowers from the same village. No member was legally liable for another's debt, but each group's access to future credit depended on its collective record, so mutual support and scrutiny did the job collateral does elsewhere. Borrowers were also encouraged to adopt the "Sixteen Decisions," pledges covering schooling, sanitation, clean water and refusing dowry.
After years of resistance from banks and officials, Grameen Bank was chartered in 1983, substantially owned by its borrowers. It went on to reach millions of people, and the model spread to roughly a hundred countries, including the United States through Grameen America. His 1997 memoir, Banker to the Poor, carried the argument to a global audience. Through Grameen Telecom he also helped found Grameenphone with Telenor, which became Bangladesh's largest mobile operator and let rural women run village phone businesses.
In 2006 Yunus and Grameen Bank shared the Nobel Peace Prize; he was the first Bangladeshi laureate. The US Presidential Medal of Freedom followed in 2009 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010.
