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...

The developing world is full of entrepreneurs and visionaries, who with access to education, equity and credit would play a key role in developing the economic situations in their countries.

Nothing is more valuable to people than health care, and by paying, they feel less like beggars and more like ‘customers’ who can and should demand quality care.

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it...

I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over.

Credit markets were originally created to serve human needs; to provide businesses and individuals with capital to start or expand businesses or fulfill other financial needs.

UN studies conducted in more than forty developing countries show that the birth rate falls as women gain equality… I believe income-earning opportunities that empower poor women … will have more impact on curbing population...

Grameen Bank was formed as an institution owned by its borrower members, who are poor women. Through its unique decision-making process, Grameen Bank has given millions of women the means to emerge from the shadows...

All human beings are very creative – full of potential, full of energy… So, money kind of allows them to express it… And if you’re successful, you can take more money. You can expand your...

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

We developed microfinance to fight loan sharks – I was telling people don’t go to loan sharks – not trying to take advantage and make money for myself. I would be a junior loan shark...

I’m encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.

Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a...

What we are trying to do is to create a social business in Bangladesh, a joint venture to create restaurants for common people. Good, healthy food at affordable prices so that people don’t have to...

Th direct elimination of elimination of poverty should be the objective of all development aid. Development should be viewed as a human rights issue, not as a question of simply increasing the gross national product...

Peace should be understood in a human way – in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of...

The Grameen clinics prove that a medical system ‘for the poor’ can be almost entirely self-supporting, and we hope we can make it fully self sufficient so we can expand it across Bangladesh.

Engaging in social business is beneficial to a company because it leverages on business competencies to address social issues, involves one-time investment with sustainable results, and produces other positive effects such as employee motivation and...