Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunus invented microcredit and ended up running Bangladesh. Born in 1940 in Chittagong, the third of nine children of a jeweller, he took a Fulbright to Vanderbilt, earned a doctorate in economics, and returned in 1972 to teach at Chittagong University in a country a year old and devastated by war and famine. The famine of 1974 made his lectures feel useless. He went into the neighbouring village of Jobra and found forty-two people whose entire working capital was tied up with moneylenders charging ruinous rates. He lent them twenty-seven dollars from his own pocket, and they all repaid. He built the finding into a system. Grameen Bank, formalised in 1983, lent small sums without collateral, chiefly to women, to groups of five borrowers who guaranteed each other socially rather than financially, with weekly repayments and a savings requirement. Repayment rates ran above 95 per cent, which was the fact that changed minds, and the model spread to more than a hundred countries. He and the bank shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. The critiques matured with the movement: interest rates that are high in absolute terms, over-indebtedness where markets became crowded, and evidence that microcredit raises resilience more reliably than it raises incomes. He fell out with Sheikh Hasina's government, was removed from the bank in 2011 over the retirement age, and faced a long series of prosecutions widely regarded as political. He was appointed head of the interim government after Hasina fled in August 2024. He inherited a country in political crisis and a mandate to reform its institutions before an election.
- Lived: 1940 CE – ?
- Nationality: Bangladeshi
- Roles: Chief Adviser, Interim Government of Bangladesh (2024-2026)
