Founders

The Grameen Bank – a Nobel Prize

Microfinance has existed in different forms for a long time. Lending and borrowing mechanisms in Africa and Asia have existed for several millennia. However, the real launch of “modern” microfinance goes back to the mid-1970s, including the creation of the Grameen Bank.

The Grameen Bank was founded in Bangladesh in 1978 by Pr. Muhammad Yunus, who was looking for a concrete response to the economic crisis affecting his country. Committed to experiment with practical solutions, he began to observe the production activities of a group of women who made bamboo stools. Without money to buy their raw material, they borrowed from local merchants but were forced to sell them the finished products at a price barely higher than the price of the raw material. Professor Yunus then loaned them the amount they needed, $ 27 interest-free, to help them get out of this deadly debt cycle. This idea gave rise to the creation of the Grameen Bank (the “village bank”), popularizing solidarity credit, a credit granted to a person within a community in which each member is solidary of others, allowing the person to use the craedit and reimburse it.

In 2006, Professor Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awwarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Created in 1989 by Professor Yunus, Grameen Trust uses microcredit as a tool to fight poverty and follows the approach of Grameen Bank for this purpose. It is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that supports and promotes microcredit and social business to fulfill its mission. To do this, it offers, among other things, training and technical assistance to national and international organizations wishing to replicate the initiatives of Grameen Bank.

To date, Grameen Trust nearly 160 partner organizations in more than 40 countries which finance a total of 12 million people, 93% of whom are women.