Dominic Cummings meets Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winner who has the answer to some of the West’s intractable problems. So why won’t politicians listen to him?
One day in 1974, at the height of the famine in Bangladesh, an economics teacher from a nearby university wandered into a village called Jobra. There he found the ladies of Jobra struggling to survive. No proper bank would deign to lend to them, so in order to finance their tiny basket-making businesses the ladies were forced to borrow from loan-sharks and pay punitive interest rates.
‘This is absurd,’ thought the teacher, Muhammad Yunus. ‘There’s enough misery around without these women being burdened by debt’ — so he lent them the money himself: $27 in total to a group of 42 women. They made a small profit, repaid Yunus promptly, and sowed in his mind a great idea.
Two years later Muhammad Yunus founded his ‘microfinance’ bank, the Grameen Bank, which specialised in making more of these tiny loans to groups of very poor women. From that first $27 sprung a vast enterprise that now lends about $100 million per month in small loans. Yunus doesn’t own the bank, Grameen’s depositors own it themselves. Ninety-seven per cent of them are women and 98 per cent repay their debts. Millions have escaped poverty and in 2006 Yunus and Grameen were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Now Professor Yunus has another idea — a development of the Grameen model. It’s about what he calls ‘social business’, the subject of his latest book. Sipping tea in a London hotel, he explains: ‘We need two kinds of business: one for personal gain, another dedicated to helping others.’ A social business is not a charity.
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