Muhammad Yunus

Muhammad Yunus, born on 28 June 1940 near Chittagong, is a Bangladeshi economist who trained in economics at Vanderbilt University and who became known worldwide as the founder of Grameen Bank. After the famine of 1974 he began to work on poverty alleviation and, from the late 1970s, experimented with lending small sums to poor villagers without collateral. The pilot project became a full bank in 1983 and used small solidarity groups of borrowers to support repayment. The approach, which he called microcredit and which is now usually grouped under microfinance, was copied in about 100 countries. Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for founding the bank, and he later promoted what he calls social business through the Yunus Centre in Dhaka. He was removed as managing director of the bank in 2011 in a dispute that he challenged in court, and in 2024 he became head of Bangladesh's interim government.