Muhammad Yunus set up the Grameen Bank in his home country of Bangladesh
with a loan of just [pound]17, to lend tiny amounts of money to the poorest
of the poor - those to whom no ordinary bank would lend. Most of his
customers - as they still are - were illiterate women, wanting to set up
the smallest imaginable village enterprises. It was his conviction that
this new system of 'micro-credit', lending even such small sums, would give
such people the spark of initiative needed to pull themselves out of
poverty. Today, Yunus's system of micro-credit is practised around the
world in some 60 countries, including the US, Canada and France. His
Grameen Bank is now a billion-pound business. It is acknowledged by world
leaders and by the World Bank to be a fundamental weapon in the fight
against poverty. Banker to the Poor is Yunus's enthralling story of how he
did it: how the terrible famine in Bangladesh in 1974 focused his ideas on
the need to enable its victims to grow more food; how he overcame the
sceptics in many governments and among traditional economic thinking; and
how he saw his micro-credit extended even outside the Third World into
credit unions in the West. Such is the importance of his book that HRH the
Prince of Wales has contributed a Foreword in which he hails 'a remarkable
man [who] spoke the greatest good sense'.