3 December 2020 Muhammad Yunus What we are trying to do is to create a social business in Bangladesh, a joint venture to create restaurants for common people. Good, healthy food at affordable prices so that people don’t have to opt for food that is unhealthy and unhygienic.
3 December 2020 Muhammad Yunus Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women.
3 December 2020 Muhammad Yunus Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.
3 December 2020 Muhammad Yunus But we have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities.
3 December 2020 Muhammad Yunus Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world – out of six billion people, more than three billion – do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.
3 December 2020 Muhammad Yunus My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.
3 December 2020 Muhammad Yunus I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in which I was working in Bangladesh.
3 December 2020 Muhammad Yunus I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.
