What if you could harness the power of the free market to solve the problems of poverty, hunger, and inequality? To some, it sounds impossible. But Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad is doing exactly that. As founder of Grameen Bank, Yunus pioneered microcredit, the innovative banking program that provides poor people – mainly women – with small loans they use to launch businesses and lift their families out of poverty. In the past thirty years, microcredit has spread to every continent and benefited over 100 million families. But Yunus remained unsatisfied. Much more could be done, he believed, if the dynamics of capitalism could be applied to humanity’s greatest challenges.

Now, in Creating a World Without Poverty, Yunus goes beyond microcredit to pioneer the idea of social business – a completely new way to use the creative vibrancy of business to tackle social problems from poverty and pollution to inadequate health care and lack of education. This book describes how Yunus – in partnership with some of the world’s most visionary business leaders – has launched the world’s first purposely designed social businesses. From collaborating with Danone to produce affordable, nutritious yogurt for malnourished children in Bangladesh to building eyecare hospitals that will save thousands of poor people from blindness, Creating a World Without Poverty offers a glimpse of the amazing future Yunus forecasts for a planet transformed by thousands of social businesses. Yunus’s “Next Big Idea” offers a pioneering model for nothing less than a new, more humane form of

By giving poor people the power to help themselves, Dr. Yunus has offered them something far more valuable than a plate of food – security in its most fundamental form.” – Former President Jimmy Carter

Muhammad is a practical visionary who has improved he lives of millions of people in his native Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world.” – Los Angeles Times

[Yunus’s] ideas have already had a great impact on the Third World, and...hearing his appeal for a ‘poverty-free world’ from the source itself can be as stirring as that all-American myth of bootstrap success.” – The Washington Post

Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad' latest book, Creating a World Without Poverty became a New York Times Best Seller in February 2008. The book also rose to No. 4 on the Business Week Best Seller List.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/books/ bestseller/200802besthardbusiness.html
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/02/0228_bestsellers/source/5.htm

Coping with financial crunch and building new social enterprises.

This is the fourth and final volume of selected articles and features which were gleaned from issues no. 1-63 of Grameen Dialogue Newsletter, the quarterly newsletter published by Grameen Trust.

Grameen Bank during the 1990s was the focal point of a fast growing global movement that stressed provision of microcredit and related services to the targeted bottom poor, for alleviation of poverty. The small action research project has over the years grown into a fullfledged financial institution that has pioneered Grameencredit and evolved altogether new systems, new processes, and new products of microfinance for direct alleviation of poverty. It has remained at the center of many new social experiments to fight poverty, but in a business like fashion - some of these experiments are still ongoing.

The learning process, the experimentation, the struggle, continue to unfold till now. Readers of this volume will have a flavour of some of the exciting new institutional developments which took place during the period when Grameen Bank grew very rapidly and in the process, tried to overcome its major challenges.

Editor: Khalid Shams