I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no f… - Muhammad Yunus

There is no room in the economic literature for people making a living through self-employment, finding way to develop goods or services that they sell directly to those who need them. But in the real world, that's what you see the poor doing everywhere.

In 1995, the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP) and the Microcredit Summit Campaign Committee formally defined a “poor” person as someone who lives below the poverty line and “poorest” as someone in the bottom half of those below the poverty line.

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.