Nobel Peace Prize winner urges graduates to 'create the world we deserve'

The following is a transcript of Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus’ remarks at Senior Class Day on May 10, 2007. Thank you. Thank you, Chancellor Gee. Good morning. What a great day! Definitely it is a great day for me – I just got $100,000! So I make you the witness, and for a guy who lends out $20, $30, that is a lot of loan here. You can reach out to so many people, and I’m very happy to be here. I feel like I am back home. When you spend seven years of your life in a place which is full of memories of your young days, that is your real home. So today, for me, is a homecoming. And Vanderbilt has played a very, very significant role in my life, and I often mention where I am from. I am from Vanderbilt. One thing Vanderbilt has done to me: Vanderbilt has made me bold, made me dare, and that helped in defying things and, unless I had gained that defiance in me, I wouldn’t be able to do the things I did. When I left Vanderbilt campus, I went to MTSU to teach in Murfreesboro. That was a wonderful experience. I taught there for three years. I saw the other side of the university life as a teacher. That prepared me to start a teaching life when I go back. I went back after seven years in Nashville and I felt that I had acquired the experience that I needed to make some contribution to my society.Full of enthusiasm I went back, started with a teaching job in one of the universities back home in Bangladesh, just a newly born country. That is where my frustrations began, all my patience began, things that I accumulated over the years. I saw an opportunity to bring it out, and the country was going through a famine in Bangladesh right after I started teaching. That’s not a pleasant experience at all. You come from a country with plenty to a country of famine, and you felt kind of useless, kind of helpless in the face of such a dire situation. But I didn’t give up. I thought, “As a human being, I can still stand next to another human being and see if I can be of any help, of any way. I do not know what it is, but I am sure I can be of some use to somebody.” That is what I did. Right outside the campus where I was teaching there are villages, traditional Bangladeshi villages where food is so scarce, where I started finding opportunities, what I could do for that particular day. Anything. I did not read anything in my textbooks, but I thought, “People don’t have to read everything in the textbooks. A textbook is a help; a textbook is not an answer book for every question.” So I did what I could do and I felt a little bit relaxed that I had done that. Then I started noticing something which I heard about before but never understood: money lending. How people get so harsh by lending tiny little money and imposing such harsh conditionalities. So my first instinct was, why don’t I find out what goes on? I did. I took a student of mine, went around in the village, and came up with a list of who borrowed money from the moneylenders. When my list was complete in several days, the total number of people on my list was 42. Forty-two people who borrowed. The total amount was the shocking part of it. The total money they borrowed was $27. See, I couldn’t believe that people have to go through so much hardships for having less than a dollar per head. I saw the problem is so acute, but it excited me. The solution was so simple. It thrilled me because of the simplicity of the solution. I thought, “If I give this $27 from my own pocket, according to the list, they can return the money to the moneylenders and they will be free. The problem is solved.” So, immediately I did that. And people are so happy. And that part I didn’t know would happen the way it did. They looked at me as if I’d descended from heaven. For $27. And it came to my mind, “If you can make so many people so happy with such a small amount of money, why shouldn’t you do more of it?” So that is my next question and my next problem.I tried to resolve it by connecting the local bank with the poor people in the village. The banks said, “No way. You cannot lend money to poor people.” But I was not in a mood to take no for an answer. I wouldn’t give up. They wouldn’t give in. So it went on for months. Finally, I resolved it by offering myself as a guarantor. I said, “I’ll be your guarantor, I’ll sign all your papers,” and it worked. So I took the money from the bank and gave it people and people are very happy. The bank manager said, “This money will never come back.” I said, “I’ll give it a try.” And I tried. I came up with simple rules which helped them to pay back, and it got paid back. The whole world said it cannot be done. I said, “I’m doing it. What’s the big deal?” They said, “You are doing it in only one village.” I said, “I’ll do it in two villages if you want.” I did it in two villages. “Make it five.” I said, “I’ll do it in five.” I did it in five. I did it in 20, I did it in 50 villages. Every time it worked. But people don’t change their mind. This is the problem.Now you are coming out of the university, and you will be facing the real world. One of the problems of the real world is the mindset. It’s very difficult to change people’s mindset. They are rock-solid. So I would invite you to keep some room in your mind, even after you have learned everything there is to learn, some question marks. “Maybe I have some room here I can adapt, adjust, I can give room to other thoughts.” That is important. So while the change is happening, the world is not changing their mind. All I could do is demonstrate more and more and more. What is it that we did so different from what traditional banks do? Is it really different, or just a small amount of money? Do I give big amount? No, it is not the question of amount. Amount comes much later. The very way it is done.Today, the way banking is done in the whole world they can serve only one-third of the whole world population. Just one-third, if I am generous. Two-thirds of the world’s population does not qualify to receive the service of conventional banks. Isn’t that a shame? That people need money and those institutions which are designed to provide that money are incapable of doing that? So, our experience came in to fill that gap. The first thing we discarded was collateral, because I saw the conventional bank got stuck there. If you have to borrow money, you have provide collateral to the banks. I said, “Forget about it. We don’t need collateral. Let’s find out how you do business without collateral.” And we found a way – it worked. So there is no collateral in Grameen Bank. There is no guarantee from anybody. There is no legal instrument. You don’t have to sign any papers which will be presented to the court. Nothing. Isn’t that amazing? No collateral, no guarantee, no legal instrument. You lend money on the basis of trust. And people say, “Aha! Trust doesn’t work.” I say, “Trust does work!” It worked with us, and now we are all over Bangladesh, our idea has spread all over the world. It works. Another piece which became very important for us, we said, “We are not interested in the past of the person. What he or she did in the past doesn’t bother us.” So we don’t dig into the credit history of anybody. We don’t dig into how his or her businesses succeeded or failed, if she’s even been in any business. We said, “We are not interested in the past, we are interested in the future of the people.” So we just look at the future, what she wants to do, and we bet on that, we give the money. And it worked. And this is, if you’ll sum up, that’s what the Grameen Bank is all about. And today, we live in Bangladesh. We serve 7 million borrowers. Ninety-seven percent are women and destitute women when they join Grameen Bank. When we ask them to join Grameen Bank they literally plead with us, “Please don’t give money to me. I don’t know how to use money.” Some would even say, “I never touched money in my life, so don’t give me money. I don’t know what to do with it.” We dared to give her money. Nervously, she came in. When for the first time she used money, made some money out of it, she got very excited. She wanted to repeat that excitement and that is what got her started. They have little savings into the bank so that they can put some money aside. In times, they need some money of their own. And then we introduced more daring things. Like, we said, “Why don’t we have a pension fund for poor people?” Everybody said, “What is a pension fund?” So we explained what it is. It is a very simple thing. Everybody liked that idea. It became a very popular idea. You put a tiny little amount every week into the bank and, if you continue to do it over 10 years, whatever money you put into the bank, the bank will match it with equal money that’s all yours. They thought it was a wonderful deal, and we think too, it’s a wonderful deal. But in the process, they build up a whole pension plan. I should quickly mention that Grameen Bank, the way we created it, it is owned by the borrowers themselves. So it is not only borrowers taking money from Grameen Bank, they are also depositing money. At the same time they are owners of the bank. Where does the money come from? We lend out over half a billion dollars a year, tiny loans averaging about $130, and that changes their world. And they own it, banks make profit, profit goes back to them. One interesting aspect which we didn’t realize at the beginning: Today, because of the sustained developing of the savings, 70 percent of the money the bank lends out comes from the savings of the borrowers themselves. So it is a self-contained bank and, in the process, people are coming out of poverty. Sixty-four percent of the borrowers of Grameen Bank have already crossed the poverty line. And if it is easy that way – you do a business and people get out of poverty – that is very happy news. And this is what kept happening. Then we encouraged them to send their children to school. Today, 100 percent of the children of Grameen families are in school. And years later, when we saw that they are all in school, something else attracted our attention. Not only did they go to school, some of those kids are at the top of the class. All these 7 million borrowers that Grameen Bank has, they are all illiterate, cannot read, cannot write. Similarly, their husbands cannot read, cannot write. Their other family members cannot read, cannot write. But, for the first time, their children went to school and started learning how to read and write. And some of them are at the top of the class. So we thought, “This needs to be celebrated.” So we started giving scholarships. Grameen Bank gives more than $30,000 in scholarships to these students who are at the top of the class. And then we noticed not only are they getting scholarships, they are getting through schools, now they are in the colleges, they are in the medical schools, they are in the engineering schools, they are in the universities.So we said, “Now that they are coming in big numbers, let’s give them education loans, student loans.” So there are more than 16,000 students right now who are in medical schools and engineering schools and universities. Three of them already completed their Ph.D.s. So you are creating a whole new generation out of illiterate, poor parents. So a second generation we are hoping will be dramatically different than what their parents were – able to create a new life. And all this comes in the context of our own first question: How to overcome poverty? Why are people poor? What is wrong with them? And we get our answer very quickly, very vividly. Nothing is wrong with them. They are as good as anybody else. They are as active as anybody else. They are as creative as anybody else. They are as smart as anybody else. But they are poor. We soon learned that poverty is not created by the poor people. Then who created it? Why are they poor? The system that we built – that created the poverty. An institution that we built – that created poverty. Concepts that we learn in our schools – that created poverty. It is all there. The seeds of poverty are in the broader vein, not in the persons. Human beings are as full of potential as anybody else. All people are as full of energy and creativity. So the poverty is imposed on some people artificially. It is not part of the person. So something artificial can always be peeled off. How do we peel it off? Change those institutions. Change those policies. Pick up the seeds of poverty from those policies. People will be out of poverty. What does it really mean in exact terms? I give one example: banking. Why should banks reject them? They were saying they are not credit-worthy. Now we see they are very much credit-worthy because their repayment there is better than anybody else – 99 percent. So why shouldn’t you lend them the money? You said they don’t have collateral. Who cares about collateral as long as the banking goes on OK? Why invent something which you don’t need? So these are the answers: Why can’t we create a banking system which is all-inclusive? Nobody will be denied. They say, “No, you can’t do that.” I said, “Of course we can do that.” So you know what we did three and a half years back? We introduced another program to demonstrate that what I said is right. What did we do? We said, “Now we focus exclusively on the beggars. We lend money to the beggars.” They said to us, “How do you lend money to the beggars?” I said, “Well, I think it’s very simple. We just go and talk to them and explain to them.” What we do in begging in Bangladesh – we go house to house and beg for rice, whatever little food we can get, so that you can collect the daily meal and cook it. This is the life of a beggar. So we sit down with her. “As you go from house to house for begging, would you care to carry some merchandise with you? So cookies, some candy, some toys for the kids, or whatever people like. So there is no extra work involved. You are going there anyway.” So this is your end of a division – sales division. You have the begging division, you have the sales division. You know, people liked it. And in the beginning we thought, “Maybe we will have a couple of thousands of beggars in the program find out what it does.” It became such a popular program among beggars, today we have nearly 100,000 beggars in the program, and in three and a half years’ time, 10 percent of them already quit begging completely. They turned themselves into salespersons, because along the way, they found out what things people liked and they come up with those things and make a good business. The bulk of them became part-time beggars. They see that they can concentrate on their sales division more than they can concentrate on the begging division. They found out which house is good for begging, which house is good for selling. Very smart – just like any other businessperson. And you know, the typical loan that the beggar asks for? $10-15. That is all. And if $10-15 dollars can change a human being from being at the mercy of another human being or group of human beings and free herself from debt and become a dignified human person, all you need is an initiative to do that. So institutional failures is one big thing on the agenda if you want to get people out of poverty, and you talk about a huge number of poor people around the world. One-half of the global population is under $2 a day, so this is not a small number. Then, another thing I keep coming to, that if it is institutional failure, we can address. What about the conceptual failure? And one conceptual failure that I would like to share with you – because you are coming up with lots of conceptual framework in your mind – is very clear how we fail in addressing the issue of human abilities. It is the concept of business. We all know what is business. But the existing concept of business, I feel very strongly, does not do justice to human beings. It limits human beings’ ability. The present concept of business is to make money. Business means, business to make money. There is no other business definition. Profit maximization is the mission of business. That is fine. But is that just what human beings are all about? What about the other ideas people have inside their heart? The same human being who wants to make money at the same time wants to do other things, do good to other people, to make an impact on this planet. “How come I cannot accommodate it in my business?” So, I am saying, there is a failure to limiting human beings in only one role, single-dimensional human beings. But human beings are multidimensional. Human beings want to make money, but human beings are also caring human beings. So in order to accommodate the other ideas, why can’t we create another type of business? Maybe you call them social business. Social business is a business to do good to other people. Social business is to solve the social problem, not for making money or personal gain out of it. It is a non-loss, non-dividend company with a social objective. And some people say, “Ah, people are crazy to do such things.” I say that you will be amazed how crazy people are. They give away their money in philanthropy. If they can give away money for philanthropy, they can put their money to do good to other people, too, as a business. Philanthropy is a wonderful idea – you help people. But philanthropy money has a capacity of one type. Social business money, social business dollars, has a multiple of that capacity, because it recycles, it goes on, it can solve the problem. Just to give you one example of what we did in a social business – we have created several companies. One I will give as an example is a yogurt company. We call it Grameen-Dannon Company. We did it with a joint venture with Dannon of France. This company in Bangladesh produces yogurt, like Dannon produces yogurt in the American market.But this is a very special type of yogurt. This yogurt is for the malnourished children of Bangladesh. There is a lot of malnourishment in Bangladesh among the poor families. The children of poor families are very, very malnourished. So we got from the research, “What are the micro-nutrients missing in all those children?” We put it into that yogurt – the vitamin, the zinc, the iron, iodine, whatever – in exactly the quantity they are missing. So we sell it to those poor children. They love the yogurt, it is delicious yogurt. But, in the process, they are regaining their health, and the company has declared right at the outset that we will not take any dividend out of this company. The success of this company will be measured by how many children regain their health. That is their success. The investors, over years, can take back their investment money, but after that, no dividend. Any profit will stay with the company for expansion of the company. So that is a social business, and I am sure many of you would think of such ideas. As I said, one doesn’t have to be bound by one particular idea; you can come up with ideas. Maybe there are many other kind of businesses, but social business is one kind that you can think about that maybe we can run companies to do business in a way people will change their own life. In order to do that, I was suggesting that maybe we should have a separate stock market. Today, the stock market that we have, we go there to make money. Where do we go if we want to do business to change the situation of the world in terms of malnutrition, in terms of poverty, in terms of women empowerment, in terms of children getting out of the street, or in terms of unemployed people getting employment? Name it. Or, in terms of the environment. If social business companies are formed, they can be listed in the social stock market and we can all go and start picking the one that we want to support and put our investment money there, in the social business, so that they can flourish. So this is the idea that I am trying to bring to the attention of people, and I am glad many people are responding to it, many people are coming very enthusiastically to create social business funds, to create venture capital for social business and so on. But the ultimate fact is the world cannot remain the way it is. It is our job – your job – to change the way you want it to be. If you don’t want to change it, it will never get changed. So it is our job to create the world that we want to live in and feel that we have succeeded in creating the world that we would like to have, and that is the world where I feel nobody should be a poor person. There is no need to be, and we can help every human being get out of poverty as soon as we can so that we have a world where there is not a single human being suffering from the misery of poverty. And in that world, the only place where we can see poverty will be in the poverty museums. We will create museums so that the younger generation of schoolchildren can go to these museums to find out what poverty used to be like. And that day we will feel that we have performed one human responsibility that we have with us. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to chat with you. Thank you. And thank you, Janice and Ed, for the wonderful, wonderful recognition. I have received the world’s biggest award, the Nobel Peace Prize, but having been recognized from your own homefolks, that is way, way bigger than that, so I am very, very happy that you honored me with such a wonderful gift, and I promise you I will keep on working with you to create the world that we deserve.