Nobel Peace Prize - This is great!

It takes a lot to lift my spirits these days, but this does it!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15246216/

OSLO, Norway - Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their pioneering use of tiny, seemingly insignificant loans - microcredit - to lift millions out of poverty.

Through Yunus's efforts and those of the bank he founded, poor people around the world, especially women, have been able to buy cows, a few chickens or the cell phone they desperately needed to get ahead.

"Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty," the Nobel Committee said in its citation. "Microcredit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights."

Loans of $200 change lives
Yunus, 65, is the first Noble Prize winner from Bangladesh, a poverty-stricken nation of about 141 million people located on the Bay on Bengal.

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Grameen Bank was the first lender to hand out microcredit, giving very small loans to poor Bangladeshis who did not qualify for loans from conventional banks. No collateral is needed and repayment is based on an honor system.

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Yunus's told The Associated Press in a 2004 interview that his "eureka moment" came while chatting to a shy woman weaving bamboo stools with calloused fingers.

Sufia Begum was a 21-year-old villager and a mother of three when the economics professor met her in 1974 and asked her how much she earned. She replied that she borrowed about 5 taka (nine cents) from a middleman for the bamboo for each stool.

All but two cents of that went back to the lender.

"I thought to myself, my God, for five takas she has become a slave," Yunus said in the interview.

"I couldn't understand how she could be so poor when she was making such beautiful things," he said.

The following day, he and his students did a survey in the woman's village, Jobra, and discovered that 43 of the villagers owed a total of about $27.

"I couldn't take it anymore. I put the $27 out there and told them they could liberate themselves," he said, and pay him back whenever they could. The idea was to buy their own materials and cut out the middleman.

They all paid him back, day by day, over a year, and his spur-of-the-moment generosity grew into a full-fledged business concept that came to fruition with the founding of Grameen Bank in 1983.

Prize a tribute to women around the world

In the years since, the bank says it has lent $5.72 billion to more than 6 million Bangladeshis. Worldwide, microcredit financing is estimated to have helped some 17 million people.

and his concept has spread to Central America and rural India.

If anyone deserves this prize, he does. He's changing the world one woman at a time, whether or not he realizes it.

He was an ordinary corporate banker before his trip to that village, lending money to big companies and the occasional man who was already rich. He's now got something like a 96% pay back rate on his micro loans, and says the default rate on the conventional bank loans was much higher.

Some of the cottage industries have been ingenious, like the cell phone and box of batteries. The woman in a village who has the cell phone becomes the communications hub for that entire village.

Yunus is one of my heroes, an ordinary man who did an amazingly compassionate thing when he was presented with the opportunity.

what a brilliant idea. The small piece i saw, was a banker going to the people with loans in India. They understood how difficult it was for the poor to travel, so they took the bank to the people.

This deserves a Nobel prize! and you're right it lifted my spirits.

what a brilliant idea. The small piece i saw, was a banker going to the people with loans in India. They understood how difficult it was for the poor to travel, so they took the bank to the people.

This deserves a Nobel prize! and you're right it lifted my spirits.

This is my latest installment of "Nixonians" a graphic history of the way that the Bush-Cheney administration is following the path of the Nixon administration. "World Poison" or "Nixonians Friday 13" is about how Henry Kissinger called Indians "bastards" while he was destroying the world, including aiding Pakistan in their war against Bangladesh. This, because India would not play ball against the USSR as per US rules. Kissinger is proof that the Nobel committee sometimes has its head up its ass.

http://www.grandtheftelectionohio.com/061013.htm