Knowra Muhammad Yunus Muhammad Yunus Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi economist and social entrepreneur who pioneered microcredit and founded Grameen Bank. He shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to create economic and social development from below.
Grameen Bank : A Bangladeshi microfinance institution founded by Muhammad Yunus to provide small loans, especially to people excluded from conventional banking. Yunus founded and led the institution that made his lending model widely known.
Microcredit : The provision of small loans to people who lack access to conventional banking, often to support self-employment. Yunus helped popularize this form of lending as a tool for addressing poverty.
Financial inclusion : Access to useful and affordable financial services, including payments, savings, credit, and insurance. Yunus’s lending programs became a prominent effort to extend formal finance to excluded borrowers.
Chittagong University : A public university in Bangladesh where Muhammad Yunus taught economics after returning from the United States. Yunus’s work as a professor there preceded his experiments with lending in nearby villages.
Fazle Hasan Abed : A Bangladeshi social entrepreneur who founded BRAC, one of the world’s largest nongovernmental development organizations. Abed built a major alternative model of Bangladeshi poverty reduction alongside Yunus’s work.
Group lending : A lending arrangement in which borrowers form groups and share responsibility or incentives for repayment. Grameen’s group-based approach helped manage lending where conventional collateral was unavailable.
Women’s economic empowerment : The expansion of women’s ability to earn income, control resources, and make economic decisions. Grameen prioritized women borrowers, making their economic roles central to debates about its impact.
Jobra : A village near Chittagong, Bangladesh, where Muhammad Yunus began lending small sums to impoverished residents in the 1970s. Yunus’s early lending experiment in Jobra helped inspire the Grameen project.
2006 Nobel Peace Prize : The Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank for efforts to create economic and social development from below. The prize recognized Yunus and Grameen Bank together, not Yunus alone.
Joint liability lending : A credit arrangement in which members of a borrowing group are collectively responsible for repayment obligations. It is often associated with early microfinance, although Grameen’s liability rules changed over time.
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