El banquero de los pobres

Muhammad Yunus has a dream: the total eradication of poverty. In 1983, against the advice of banking and his government authorities, Professor Yunus founded Grameen, a bank dedicated to providing miniscule loans to the poorest people in Bangladesh. His goal was not simply to help the poor survive, but to ignite initiative and entrepreneurship that would help them lift themselves out of poverty. That idea was born one day in 1976 when, out of his own pocket, Yunus lent an amount equivalent to 27 dollars to forty-two inhabitants of a Bangladeshi village. They were stool makers who needed nothing more than enough credit to acquire the raw material for their craft. Yunus' loan helped them break the devastating cycle of poverty and turn their lives around. His solution to world poverty, founded on the belief that credit is a fundamental human right, is brilliantly simple: lend poor people money, promote a set of sound financial principles that govern their lives, and they they will help themselves.In The Banker of the Poor, Yunus describes the many obstacles he has had to overcome to put his ideas into practice - his battles with bank bureaucrats, the deep-seated fears of his first and temporary borrowers - and also his victories. . The author questions our usual way of perceiving the economic relationship between rich and poor, their respective rights and duties, their origins and their future. Put into practice, Yunus's theories work. Grameen Bank has provided more than $2.5 billion in microloans to more than two million families in rural Bangladesh. Nearly 95% of Yunus' clients are women and the loan repayment rate is almost 100%. New microcredit programs are springing up around the world following the Grameen model.