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Photo: Kris Herbst/ Changemakers.net

 

Longtime IDRC partner Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 13 October 2006 for his work in advancing economic and social opportunities for the poor, especially women. Yunus shares the award with the bank he founded, the Grameen Bank, which has been instrumental in helping millions of poor Bangladeshis, many of them women, improve their lives by lending them small sums to start businesses.

 

Muhammad Yunus’ bank has gone from loaning poor women money to buy chickens and cows to financing the largest mobile telephone company in the region. IDRC has collaborated with Yunus and Grameen on a number of projects linking the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to poverty reduction.

 

For example, IDRC’s support to the Village Internet Program built up the bank’s intra-national communications, in particular to its rural offices. The Grameen Trust Library was provided with a 24-hour line, which gave library users access to Internet and email. Subsidized Internet connections were provided to some schools. A village Internet program was piloted in Madhupur, Tangail district. And, in an innovative experiment, the project team successfully provided Internet connection to a village without telephone service via mobile telephone.

 

Speaking at the IDRC-sponsored Harvard Forum: A Dialogue on ICTs and Poverty in 2003, Yunus described how mobile service provision can be of major benefit to poor people. “Now we have more than 30 000 telephone ladies providing the service and not only are they providing the service, the amazing thing is the income they earn from this service. Minimum income is $50 a month net profit and it goes all the way to $500 per month.  Imagine in a country with an average  per capita income less than $400, a woman with a mobile telephone earning $500 a month by just making this service available.”

 

Thirty international experts, among them Nobel prize-winning economists Amartya Sen and Michael Spence and ICT pioneer Onno Purbo, participated in the forum.

 

In its citation, the Nobel committee noted that “Muhammad Yunus . . . has managed to translate visions into practical action for the benefit of millions of people. From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed microcredit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty.  . . .  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.”

 

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