Founder of the Grameen Bank, Nobel Peace Prize laureate 2006
http://www.grameen-info.org/
Muhammad Yunus (born in Chittagong on 28 June 1940) is a Bangladeshi economist. He is the founder of Grameen Bank that grants mircocredits and, thus, one of the founders of the microfi nance. In 2006, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was offered a Fulbright scholarship in 1965 to study at the Vanderbilt University (USA). He obtained his PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University in 1969. From 1970 to 1972, he was an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University in Tennessee, USA. In 1972, he was appointed to a professorship at the Chittagong University in Bangladesh. From 1976, he was project manager at Grameen Bank. From 1983, he worked as a managing director at Grameen Bank. Since 1996, he has acted as adviser to the government of Bangladesh. Muhammad Yunus deserves to be mentioned as one of the founders of an independent Bangladesh. He is regarded as one of its spiritual fathers. Together with his friends, he wrote texts for worldwide publication and organized demonstrations, always keeping in mind that he was doing it for the hunger-ridden people of his country. For further information see Muhammad Yunus, Grameen: Eine Bank für die Armen der Welt, Bergisch Gladbach 1998, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty, 2003 Yunus has been awarded honor- ary doctorate degrees from all over the world. In 1994, he was awarded World Food Prize, in 1995 the Max Schmidheiny Freedom Prize, in 1997 the Planetary Consciousness Prize, in 1998 the Sydney Peace Prize, and in 2006 Seoul Peace Prize. He is also a founding member of the Global Academy of Ashoka, an international organization created by and for social entrepreneurs, and a member of the board of trustees of the German 'Stiftung Entrepreneurship.' For promoting economic and social development from below, he and the bank he had founded were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. He was the third Bengali after Rabindranath Tagore and Amartya Sen to receive a Nobel Prize. Muhammad Yunus is married and has two daughters.