Happy New Year, Muhammad!

   All the newspapers are doing their "look-back" issues, summarizing the events of 2005 for their readers. So many of their pages are filled with stories that sell; you know, tragedy and violence. There seems so little that is hopeful and uplifting. That's why I've chosen to make my last entry for the year about one Muhammad Yunus, so that my little corner of blogdom will end the year on a note of optimism.
   Yunus, known as the "banker to the poor", runs Bangladesh's Grameen Bank. He took his first step toward his place in the world of finance in 1976, when he was an economics professor at Chittagong University in Bangladesh. He lent $27.00 of his own money to a group of poor craftsmen in the town of Jobra, and volunteered to serve for them as a guarantor of a larger loan from a bank. Yunus was sure that poor people can be both dependable in their repayment of loans and ardent in their pursuit of entrepreneurship. It was a belief not many shared at that time.
   Through his work, Yunus has become familiar with some of the soul-destroying realities of grinding poverty. He states that as many as 1.2 billion people lack access to basic necessities and views microfinance as their ladder on which to climb out of the abyss of anguish that has ensnared them.
   Another less-than-common belief espoused by Yunus was that women were the borrowers to focus on. He felt that they are the most likely to be concerned with the welfare of their family and therefore the most highly motivated to be good customers for the bank. This was something else that set Yunus aside in the traditional Muslim society of Bangladesh. Although he had to work for six years to achieve his goal of 50-50 gender distribution among the bank's borrowers, the distribution has not stayed even. Today in fact, 96% of Grameen's borrowers are women. Even more astonishingly, the bank includes a project called "The Struggling Members Program" which serves 55,000 beggars. Since it has not yet collapsed, perhaps Grameen could offer a lesson or two on serving the poor to some of the North American giants of banking.
   Yunus lets none of the proverbial moss grow under his feet. This activist, having earned the title of "genius" from Sam Daley-Harris, director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, is not content to step back and leave the work to others. He is busy attracting private capital to fund his socially driven businesses, such as Grameen Phone. In this endeavor, loans are made to individual women so that they can become "the village phone lady", using handsets and solar chargers to operate a pay phone in many rural areas of Asia and Africa. Yunus also has plans to make nutritious and inexpensive baby formula, to provide low-cost eyecare and to equip rural hospitals with video-conferencing connections to doctors in distant cities.
   Hats off to you, Muhammad. You are a credit to the human race, and a real inspiration. May you be blessed with many long years to come. Happy, happy new year, Mr. Yunus.