Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

by Muhammad Yunus

One reason we are so acutely aware of health problems is that they can destroy even our brightest successes. Morley Safer’s Sixty Minutes program of 1989 featured one borrower near Chittagong who, thanks to Grameen loans, had risen from being a street beggar to owning seven cows, a large plot of land, a new house, a modern latrine, and a three-wheeled baby taxi for her husband and ensuring a school education for all her children. Morley Safer called her “the picture of contentment and human success,” yet when I met her and her husband again in 1996, I could barely recognize them. He had contracted a stomach illness that was never properly diagnosed. To pay for his medical treatment, the couple had sold off their taxi, their land, and their cattle. She was so frail and tired, she did not trust herself to take a new loan. All they had left were four chickens.