Book Review
CREATING A WORLD WITHOUT POVERTY: SOCIAL BUSINESS AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM
By Muhammad Yunus
Public Affairs, 261 pages, $26
Muhammad Yunus was looking forward to a career as an economics professor when he became curious about why so many people in his native Bangladesh were mired in poverty.
He had encountered a woman who turned to a local moneylender whenever she needed cash for materials to make stools. The moneylender required that she sell him everything she produced at a price he would determine, a system Mr. Yunus equated with “slave labor.” Mr. Yunus then began lending money out of his own pocket to poor women and eventually founded Grameen Bank to provide small, low-interest loans to people with no credit history and no collateral.
Grameen (the word means village) has since opened 2,500 branches across Bangladesh, lending money to millions of poor people who otherwise would have no access to credit. Skeptics said impoverished borrowers would never repay their loans, but in fact the repayment rate has been close to 99 percent. As a result, microcredit has become a growing worldwide phenomenon.
