Democrats everywhere are basking in the glory of Al Gore’s recent Nobel Peace Prize, but another Nobel winner, Muhammad Yunus, will speak at Pepperdine University in Malibu at a free event next weekend.
The event, titled “Social Enterprise: Doing Well by Doing Good,” will be held on Saturday, October 20, from 10-11 a.m. at Pepperdine in the Caruso Auditorium. The address is 24255 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.
All seats at the Caruso Auditorium have been filled, but you should register here (http://www.pepperdine.edu/yunus/), show up anyway, and you might get lucky. Even if you don’t get into Caruso, you can watch the speech live in designated classrooms.
Yunus and Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their efforts to provide microcredit, small person-to-person loans, for very poor people.
Banks had previously refused to lend money to poor Bangladeshis, fearing they would never see their money again. So, poor people sometimes turned to loan sharks, who, naturally, would charge exorbitant interest.
Yunus proved that some among the very poor are indeed enterprising capitalists like any others, and just need a bit of help to get going.
Unlike traditional banks, the Grameen Bank did not ask for collateral for loans. Instead, small loans were made, typically to women, who would then buy the materials needed to support a small business, such as a mobile phone cart or a sewing enterprise.
Instead of signing contracts, people simply agree to pay the money back. It is a system based on trust carried out between people who know each other.
And 99% of borrowers pay the money back.
This was taken from the Nobel Committee’s 2006 news release:
“Every single individual on earth has both the potential and the right to live a decent life. Across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development.”
“Micro-credit has proved to be an important liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions. Economic growth and political democracy can not achieve their full potential unless the female half of humanity participates on an equal footing with the male.”
I urge everyone who can to attend Yunus’s lecture at Pepperdine. Listening to him speak in his charming and understated fashion about helping the poor in a way that ennobles them and helps them to become independent will make you feel hopeful about humanity again.
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