Microcredit offers millions way out of poverty in Bangladesh

DHAKA, Oct 13, 2006 (AFP) – Nearly three decades after Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus launched the pioneering Grameen Bank, giving small loans to the poor, microcredit is hailed for helping more than five million Bangladeshis. Grameen began life in 1976 as a pilot project run by Yunus, a professor of rural economics at Chittagong University in southeastern Bangladesh.

The project set out to prove that lending to the poor was not an “impossible proposition”.

Bangladeshi banker to poor and Nobel peace prize winner
DHAKA, Oct 13, 2006 (AFP) – Mohammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi "banker to
the poor" who won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, is celebrated for
pioneering small loans to the destitute of Bangladesh — a lending
formula now used round the world.

The
economics professor began fighting poverty during a devastating famine
in Bangladesh, setting up the tiny Grameen Bank in 1976 to provide
access to credit to people t