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Muhammad Yunus, famed banker to the world's poorest people, here for
April 19 public talk
18
April 2002
Public
Affairs
Muhammad
Yunus, whose movement to provide tiny loans to the poor has transformed
millions of desperate lives, will speak on the Berkeley campus on Friday.
Sponsored
by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of
Society (CITRIS), Yunus will discuss how information technology can help
alleviate poverty at 4 p.m. Friday, April 19 in the Bechtel Engineering
Center's Sibley Auditorium.
Yunus is
the founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and
has gained international renown for developing the concept of "micro-loans"
to help the poor become self-sufficient. Started 18 years ago with a
$26 loan to 42 women, Yunus's Grameen Bank now has over 1,050 branches
and has provided loans to 3.5 million customers.
Rejecting
the traditional bankers' belief that loans should be made only to those
with collateral, Yunus started a bank with a mission of extending credit
to the poorest. The results certainly have challenged conventional banking
wisdom. The bank has achieved a 97 percent rate of repayment.
The Grameen
Bank requires that those applying for loans be landless. Correspondingly,
94 percent of Grameen's customers are women. As Yunus explains, "When
a woman brings in income, the immediate beneficiaries are her children."
Yunus was
a professor of economics at Chittagong University in Bangladesh when
he helped give birth to this revolution in the banking industry. In
his talk here, he will discuss the role information technology plays
in helping people escape the clutches of poverty.
"Information
Technology is the best friend the poor can get," said Yunus, who will
describe how satellite phones transformed a farming village in Bangladesh.
"We are
thrilled to be hosting Muhammad," said Ruzena Bajcsy, director of CITRIS.
"His emphasis on work that has social impact embodies the spirit of CITRIS.
We see technology as a means of transforming lives in a meaningful and
positive way."
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