Written by Malorye Branca
on Monday, 09 March 2009
Microfinance was selected as one of the top 30 innovations of the last 30 years, according to judges at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania. The list was compiled in celebration of the 30th year of PBS’s Nightly Business Report television show. The show’s viewers were invited to create the preliminary list by suggesting advances they admired most during the 1979 to 2009 time frame. Professors at The Wharton School then selected and ranked the top thirty winners last month.
Coming 17th on the list, microfinance “became a movement in the 1980's… when economist Muhammad Yunus founded his Grameen Bank and started making very small loans to the poor in Bangladesh,” according to the program’s description. The listing also mentions that “Yunus and Grameen were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.”
Other innovations in the top 30 list included the World Wide Web (#1), email (#4), social networking (#20), biofuels (#25), and ATM machines (#27).
See a slide show featuring all 30 innovations.
Victor Pinchuk Foundation's Philantrophy Roundtable at Davos, January 29th, 2009.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton (standing left) and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (seated)
From Left to right: Actor/Philanthropist Jet Li, Microsoft
Chairman Bill Gates, Matthew Bishop of the Economist, Grameen Bank's Muhammad Yunus,
and Richard Branson, Chairman of Virgin Group
At Davos, Yunus Urges “Use Business Skills for Social Good”
Written by Noor Shams
on Friday, 20 February 2009
Muhammad Yunus urged some of the world’s leading philanthropists to “apply business skills to solving social problems,” while speaking at the Philanthropy Round Table, sponsored by the Victor Pinchuck Foundation, at the World Economic Forum in Davos recently. Yunus is the 2006 Nobel Peace Laureate. He shared the prize with Grameen Bank, the groundbreaking microfinance organization that he founded.
The panel was moderated by Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and included Yunus, Virgin Group Chairman Sir Richard Branson, actor/philanthropist Jet Li, and Bill Gates, founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Chairman of Microsoft. A key theme was the immense pressure that the financial crisis has placed on philanthropic organizations.
Introducing the panel, Blair emphasized that the world needs philanthropy more than ever, and “Really creative innovative ideas, like what Muhammad Yunus has done with microfinance.”
Blair was followed to the podium by Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who emphasized that the world economy is currently unequal, unstable, and unsustainable. “In the United States too much of our growth went to too few people,” Clinton said, “And that started the unraveling that we are living with.”
Clinton highlighted three goals for philanthropists:
• Help keep people alive
• Provide economic growth among the poor
• Promote health and address health issues.
“The focus should be on ‘how’ to address these,” Clinton said, “The reason Muhammud Yunus won the Nobel prize, finally, is because he answered a “how” question.” Clinton added that the private sector or government can never answer the “how” alone.
When it was his turn to speak, Yunus urged philanthropists to keep giving, but said “sustainable social businesses” are also part of the solution. Social businesses are self-sustaining, but they are focused on social good rather than profit maximization. Yunus pointed to arrangements such as the one Grameen has forged with Danone, whereby the French dairy firm has built a small factory that manufactures nutrient-rich yogurt that is very affordably priced. (See this YouTube Video for more on this project.)
Written by Noor Shams
on Thursday, 12 February 2009
The Girl Effect is now probably one of the most viral of all videos in circulation, so it's not surprising that at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, there was a panel devoted to the topic of girls and global development. Professor Muhammad Yunus joined UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman and Melinda French Gates, Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and several others for this panel, which was one of the best attended at the meeting.
The panel was asked to discuss this question: "An educated girl will invest 90% of her future income in her family, yet little more than half a cent of every international development dollar is spent on her. What needs to be done to realize the potential of the "girl effect" on developing economies worldwide?"
According to reports from the meeting, the panelists said that more attention needs to go towards giving girls a proper education, protecting them from threats such as sex trafficking, and giving them the resources they need to be self-supporting.
Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has been one of the most forward-looking organizations in this regard. The bank makes the vast majority of its loans to women, encourages education and discourages practices such as the payment of dowries. Professor Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank and shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize with the bank, long ago observed that women were more likely to invest in their families, and so decided to focus on helping women get small loans to support their small businesses. Grameen America, which was launched approximatley one year ago, also makes most of its loans to poor women.
Marie Eitl posted a story about the Davos panel on The Huffington Post, Associated Press posted this story, and BusinessWeek this blog.
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