Good afternoon. Thank you so much for coming. We have a full house here at the Council on Foreign Relations today, and for obvious reason. I'm Isobel Coleman. I am a senior fellow here for U.S. foreign policy and I also direct the Women in Foreign Policy Program. And I just want to remind you all that this meeting in on the record. Please take this opportunity to turn off all electronic devices; BlackBerrys, Redberries, cell phones, whatever you may have. And also this meeting is being webcast. It is with tremendous pleasure that I have the opportunity to introduce our speaker today, Professor Muhammad Yunus, who is one of my personal heroes. And I must say he arrived a little bit harried. His luggage had gone astray. He was wearing, I think, jeans and a green cardigan, but looked every bit as distinguished as he does now that he has changed and cleaned himself up. Muhammad Yunus, as all of you in this room know, took a small idea, making loans to the very poor in Bangladesh, and has turned it into, along with the help of many other people, but really turned it into one of the great big ideas of our time. And for that, he and the Grameen Bank were recognized for their efforts this year with the Nobel Peace Prize. And he has been on the short list for, I know, over a decade, and all I can say is, about time. This truly is a person Grameen today has made over $5 billion in loans and served 6 million people, 97 percent of them very poor women. And this man and this concept needs no further introduction. Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, I got back my luggage. I could. make myself presentable quickly. I'm so honored that you organized this meeting and that this gave me a chance to meet many of my friends here; otherwise, probably I would not get a chance to meet them in a kind of rushed visit to New York. I'm very happy that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee decided to give the prize to me and Grameen Bank this year because it. suddenly world changed for me personally and for microcredit. I'm just coming from Halifax, where we had our Microcredit Summit, which is held usually after five years. So this is our third summit that we are having. Our first summit was in 1997 in Washington, D.C. Many of you may remember it. And we set a goal to reach 100 million poorest families with microcredit, preferably to the women of those families, by 2005. And 2005 was declared as International Year of Microcredit because that was our terminal year. Last year U.N. observed the year as International Year of Microcredit. And we have reached 100 million. When we declared it in Washington D.C., everybody said you are crazy, it will never happen, because you don't have the money, you don't have an institution, you don't have the manpower. You have nothing. We said we have determination, that's only thing we've got. And we'll make it happen. And we're lucky. At that time we were not sure whether we'll make it. We said even if we do 50 million that's good enough. If you have reached 50 million people, poorest families, poorest women, with microcredit, that's an achievement by itself, so 100 million was not something that we have to really on the dot have it delivered. So we did it, 100 million have been reached, so that's a cause of celebration in the summit, that we came all the way and did it. And also other celebration, of course, was the Nobel Prize, because everybody who came, there were 2,300 delegates in Halifax coming from all over the world, from all countries, and it appeared like they, every one of them, are the Nobel laureates. This is a fantastic energy that created in them, so now we can achieve anything we want. First of all, have done something, and then right on the date, we got the Nobel Prize. So we said they set the new goals now. What does it mean to have microcredit for the poor people? And one example I gave was, suppose suddenly today, 16 th of November, all the banks in the world become dysfunctional. All the banking in the world doesn't work anymore. Your check doesn't work. Your credit card doesn't work. You bank account doesn't work. Nothing works. It will be such a horror story, worth a Hollywood movie. You can really build a Hollywood movie on how we. blackout on this, suddenly something happened. But this happens for almost two-thirds of the world population every day. For them it doesn't exist. Nobody cares. Nobody feels the horror in it. So microcredit is a kind of window, a little opening for them to see that it's possible for them. And it works as good as any other banking anywhere in the world, even better. Today Grameen Bank has nearly 7 million borrowers. Ninety-seven percent of them are women. And it's owned by them. And the money that we lend out comes from its own deposits. It doesn't take money from outside. It doesn't borrow money from anybody. No donor money is involved in it. And we have plenty of money to lend money to people. Last year we opened branches because we. one decision we took recently, that nobody in Bangladesh, the poor families. no poor family in Bangladesh should be left out of the reach of microcredit. Today we cover 80 percent of the poor families of Bangladesh. So our goal is to make it 100 percent so that there is no family left out. So we are opening branches wherever we left out corners, pockets. So last year we had opened branch on an average of one branch per day for every day of the year. So that's quite a management challenge. This year we thought we'll kind of level off. This year we have done on an average of two branches per day, every day of the year. And it works. And our direction to each branch is, you go there, mobilize the money from the locality that you'll be serving, and take that money and give it to the poor people of the locality. And help build up the local economy. So money doesn't come from Dacca to some remote village, Dacca to some little village. It's all local money. And then they generate surplus. They have more excess money to spare, which they send out to us. We give them. we say that if you have excess, you send it to head office, we'll give you interest, so don't worry about your cost part of it. So this is what appears. It is owned by the borrowers, and the children are going to school. Hundred percent children of Grameen families are in school. And they not only went to school, now going into higher education. We are giving higher education loans. Right now there are more than 12,000 students who are in medical schools, engineering schools and all kinds of professional schools, universities. And waves of new students are coming because it's for the first time this generation is going to school. Their parents never went to school, they're all totally illiterate, cannot write, cannot read. Never in history of their families ever anybody ever went to school. So a new generation is coming with 7 million families where they are going to school, and some of them are now at the top of their educational level, already several of them got Ph.D.s. It's amazing kind of change that happens in the family. So all these things can happen with just doing business. Grameen Bank makes profit. So if all can be done just by doing business, the question that I always raise: Why aren't we doing more of this business? And that's the question to you, too: How do we do it?
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