In my experience, poor people are the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. Every day, they must innovate in order to survive. They remain poor because they do not have the opportunities to turn their creativity into sustainable...

I was born in 1940 in Hathazari, Chittagong, which is now part of Bangladesh. Education was always important to my parents, and with what little we had, they were able to provide an education for...

I learned that things are never as complicated as we imagine them to be. It is only our arrogance which seeks to find complicated answers to simple problems.

Poverty is unnecessary.

While technology is important, it’s what we do with it that truly matters.

When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off...

They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.

I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in...

I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn’t have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me....

Poverty is an artificial, external imposition on a human being; it is not innate in a human being. And since it is external, it can be removed. It is just a question of doing it.

But we have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities.

The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world. All we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them!

By simply capitalizing on core strengths and knowledge, companies and entrepreneurs can engage in an emerging business model that will enable them to create – and demonstrate – real, sustainable social impact in society.

Money commands everything because that’s our interpretation of capitalism… what kind of world is that? It’s a very uncomfortable interpretation of a human being. We have been turned into robots.

The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability.

Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business.

I began my work in the ’70s, teaching at a university in Bangladesh, and these economic theories that I had learned stopped ringing true for me, as I saw the misery of people living all...

Making money is a happiness. And that’s a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.

The profit orientation is only one orientation of a person. The same people who are interested in profit-making are also selfless. I am not saying that capitalist theory is wrong. I am saying that it...

If you look at the gender composition of all the borrowers of all the banks in Bangladesh, not even 1% of the borrowers happen to be women.

The process of breaking down fear was always my greatest challenge and it was made easier by the careful work and gentle voices of my female workers.

The new millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human...

Business is a very beautiful mechanism to solve problems, but we never use it for that purpose. We only use it to make money. It satisfies our selfish interest but not our collective interest.

Even today we don’t pay serious attention to the issue of poverty, because the powerful remain relatively untouched by it. Most people distance themselves from the issue by saying that if the poor worked harder,...

There are cultural issues everywhere – in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences.

I founded Grameen Bank to provide loans to those considered traditionally unbankable. Grameen Bank works with the poorest and often illiterate, providing uncollateralized micro-loans for tiny business enterprises by which they can lift themselves and...

To overcome poverty and the flaws of the economic crisis in our society, we need to envision our social life. We have to free our mind, imagine what has never happened before and write social...

We have a list of human rights – right to food, right to shelter, right to health, right to education, many such items which are considered and accepted as bill of rights. These are to...

Changes are products of intensive efforts.

Good economic theory must give the people the chance to use their talents to build their own lives. We must get away from the traditional route where the rich will do the business and the...

Money begets money. If you don’t have that, you wait around to be hired by somebody at the mercy of others. If you have that money in your hand, you desperately try to make the...

Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That’s where it will be.

Microcredit has shown how you can reach out to people that conventional banking cannot. It has demonstrated that it’s a doable proposition.

What we need is to think strategically about development, analyzing a country’s potential role in its region and the world in search of opportunities for growth. Platforms like the Global Social Business Summit can facilitate...

Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful...

Capitalism has been interpreted as an exclusively profit-centric human engagement. Some have been saying to bring people and planet into the picture. This can be a good change, but it is still not fully operationalized....

The system we have built refuses to recognize people. Only credit cards are recognized. Drivers’ licenses are recognized. But not people. People haven’t any use for faces anymore, it seems. They are busy looking at...

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.

If the basic structure of Grameen is changed, the worry is that the poor women who are the rightful owners of the bank will be disenfranchised.

When a destitute mother starts earning an income, her dreams of success invariably center around her children. A woman’s second priority is the household. She wants to buy utensils, build a stronger roof, or find...

Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in.

I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there were 42 names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was...

Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world – out of six billion people, more than three billion – do not qualify to take out...

I wanted to give money to people like this woman so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell their product at the price which the markets gave them – which was much...

…one cannot but wonder how an environment can make people despair and sit idle and then, by changing the conditions, one can transform the same people into matchless performers.

I said peace is sometimes narrowly interpreted; it’s the absence of conflict between nations or something. But peace is more inherent, more basic to human life, human beings, what we feel about each other, what...

Long live Grameen Bank. Let the power of poor women prevail.

What I did not know yet about hunger, but would find out over the next twenty-one years, was that brilliant theorists of economics do not find it worthwhile to spend time discussing issues of poverty...

Truly affordable but high-quality health care tools and services are the only means by which quality health care can be provided to all.

The Grameen Bank Ordinance with amendments up to 2008 is a beautiful legal structure for the fulfillment of the ideals and objectives of the bank. Any change in this structure will be devastating for the...