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"All I did was lend money," peace laureate says

Reuters

December 9, 2006

OSLO (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus said on Saturday that all he did to aid some of the world's poorest people was to lend them some money.

Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the 2006 peace prize for their work to lift millions out of poverty by granting tiny loans of under $100 to the rural poor of Bangladesh, pioneering a global movement now known as microcredit.

"And all I did was lend money," Yunus told Reuters in an interview in the Norwegian capital where he and a representative of Grameen Bank will receive the Nobel prize at a ceremony on Sunday.

The bank, which has 7 million clients in Bangladesh, is owned by its customers and counts 85,000 beggars among its members. It does not demand collateral, and almost no one defaults on their loans.

"I feel very happy as a human being that I have done something which has helped someone out of begging. It puts the person in full human dignity," he said.

Yunus said a typical Grameen loan to a beggar would be around $12, and he said the bank works with the beggars to try to graduate them from begging to selling items door to door.

"As we go on, many, many beggars are coming out of begging completely," Yunus, an economics professor, said.

"At last count more than 5,000 of the beggars have completely stopped begging and become door-to-door sales persons and many more thousands have become part-time beggars and part-time sales persons," he said.

Yunus's is a self-help philosophy. Though he grants them loans, "The Banker to the Poor" is known to avoid giving money to beggars on the streets.

"The reason I hesitate to give charity money to a beggar is that ... that gives me a kind of feeling that I have solved the problem ... But I have not really solved the problem, I am only pushing away the problem by giving the money."

"Just because they are beggars does not mean they don't have enough capacity to take care of themselves -- they just don't have enough opportunity," he said

"So why don't I create an opportunity, maybe a tiny opportunity, but an opportunity nonetheless."

Yunus said that his message to world leaders would be to urge them to get back to work to achieve the U.N. millennium goals to halve poverty by 2015.

He said the peace award was a big boost to his work by underscoring the link between poverty eradication and peace and the link between microcredit and poverty reduction.

"The Nobel Peace Prize has done something fantastic for us," the laureate said.