Yunus given honorable US Medal

The microfinance pioneer and Bangladeshi Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award of the United States, in recognition of his efforts toward combating global poverty, a Bangladeshi newspaper The Daily Star reports.

House Speaker John Boehner presented Yunus with the Congressional Gold Medal to him during the award ceremony held on Apr. 17 in the Rotunda of the US Capitol in Washington.

“Professor Yunus set out to do what may be the biggest thing of all, and that is liberating people to seek a better life. And not just any people, but men and women who had only known misery, who had been told they were no good,” Boehner said at the ceremony.

“To do all this, he first had to teach himself how to run a bank from scratch. That was when he realised he had to do the exact opposite of what a bank normally does to make his idea work. Then there was actually getting people to borrow the money, to see value in themselves, to spark their sense of wonder. He had to convince them that they too didn’t need rank or status to advance their place in life,” he added.

Yunus is the 17th person in history to have won both the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, another of the highest US civilian awards, according to the news reports. Yunus won the latter award in 2009.

The award places him in the company of Norman Borlaug, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, Aung San Suu Kyi and Mother Teresa who have received the two medals from the US as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.

“It’s very emotional. It’s not only an endorsement, but an inspiration for everybody who has supported us — colleagues and friends, staff and borrowers of the Grameen Bank, all the people who participate in social business,” Yunus told The New York Times.

“I’m grateful to the US Congress that it paid attention. Many people do good things that are never recognised. I’m very blessed that way,” he said, while dedicating the honour to the people of Bangladesh.

Yunus is best known for developing the concept of microcredit and using that model of lending to promote economic and social opportunity.

Through his Grameen Bank, Yunus pioneered the movement and helped hundreds of millions come out of poverty. Today, microfinance providers reach about 200 million clients globally.

In Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank, the first bank in the world owned by poor women, has 8.4 million borrowers — 96 percent of whom are women.

Known as the Banker to the Poor, Yunus has set up many other enterprises that offer an array of products and services to the poor, to achieve his lone ambition of eradicating poverty from the world, or, as he likes to put it, “sending poverty to the museum”.

In the next five years, Yunus wants to see at least 1 percent of the world economy made up of social business, his new passion.

“If we can make that 1 percent happen, I think the world will be completely different. People will see how exciting it is, and soon the level will rise from 1 to 5 percent and pave the way to 50 percent,” he said.

Social business is a non-dividend company dedicated to solving human problems. It allows the company to make profit, but it stays with the company. The owner will only get back the original investment, and nothing more, according to Yunus. He is upbeat about the success of social business, as he was in the case of microcredit.

“There’s a whole generation of young people coming up with social business ideas. Profit making doesn’t interest them as much as it interested people before, particularly the post-war [Liberation War of Bangladesh] generation. Their main question is: What am I going to do with my life? What is the purpose of my life?”

Yunus said once people like the idea of social money, they would start diverting their business money into social businesses.

The microcredit pioneer said it was very much possible to eradicate poverty. “With the creative power we have today, this is a do-able proposition. We can create a world where poverty doesn’t exist. In order for the next generation to see poverty, we’ll have to create poverty museums. That’s where poverty belongs, not in human society.”

“So let’s put this on the list of impossibilities that we want to make possible within the next 20 years. That’s the way change takes place,” he told The New York Times.