Muhammad Yunus Quotes

As a social business, Grameen Danone follows the basic principle that it must be self-sustaining, and the owners must remain committed to never take any dividend beyond the return of the original amount they invested. The company’s success is judged each year not by the amount of profit generated, but by the number of children who escape malnutrition in that particular year.

Our financial institutions have created a worldwide system of apartheid without anyone being horrified by it. If you don't have collateral, you are not credit worthy. To the banks, you are not accepted on our side of the world.

As a social business, Grameen Danone follows the basic principle that it must be self-sustaining, and the owners must remain committed to never take any dividend beyond the return of the original amount they invested.

Like any other idea, that of social business is subject to being misused and perverted. A few powerful people will look for ways to distort the concept and twist it for their own benefit — just as some misguided people have applied the term “microcredit” to describe companies that are really just loan sharks in disguise. Well-intentioned people will need to be on guard against those who would abuse the good name of social business.

My experience with Jobra’s deep tubewell convinced me to turn my focus on the landless poor. Soon I started arguing that wherever a poverty alleviation program allowed the nonpoor to be copassengers, the poor would soon be elbowed out of the program by those who were better off. In the world of development, if one mixes the poor and the nonpoor in a program, the nonpoor will always drive out the poor, and the less poor will drive out the more poor, unless protective measures are instituted right at the beginning. In such cases, the nonpoor reap the benefits of all that is done in the name of the poor.

Even reading a single page was extremely difficult. It said nothing.

GDP does not and cannot tell the whole story. Activities that do not require money changing hands are not counted as part of GDP — which means that, in effect, many of the things real human beings cherish most are treated as having no value. By contrast, money spent on weapons of

Rather than limiting population growth, they should concentrate on improving the economic status of the people in general and the people at the bottom half in particular. Governments and population agencies are not putting nearly as much effort into changing the quality of life of the poor as they put into their scare tactics, such as pressuring illiterate men and women to physically remove their ability to procreate. UN

I believe that poor people are the world's greatest entrepreneurs. Everyday, they must innovate in order to survive.

Most rich nations use their foreign aid budget mainly to employ their own people and to sell their own goods, with poverty reduction as an afterthought. The 25 percent that is spent in Bangladesh usually goes straight to a tiny elite of local suppliers, contractors, consultants, and experts. Much of this money is used by these elites to buy foreign-made consumer goods, which is of no help to our country’s economy or workforce.

Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.

I’ve been arguing that the capitalist system as we know it is harmful without a new sector — the social business sector — that is dedicated to solving the problems we are piling up around us. It is driven by a largely overlooked factor in human behavior: the drive to solve human problems unselfishly for the simple joy and pride that it brings.

But I suppose the first thing I would do is move the headquarters to Dhaka.

All it takes to get poor people out of poverty is for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly.

In other words, economic development should be judged and measured by the per capita real income of the bottom 50 per cent of the population.