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Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus: Everyone is an entrepreneur
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)


San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper), June 15, 2015
Posted: June 21st, 2015
http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Nobel-Prize-winn...

Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the global microfinance movement, is perhaps best known for winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Yunus thinks the American Dream or at least key components of it is kind of a sham. Its the tyranny of employment, Yunus told me. Its not the working that he objects to. Its the idea that so many simply aspire to work for someone else. For him, the idea of employment is the result of an artificial economic system that anoints the few as entrepreneurs and the rest of us workers. The philosophy goes to the heart of Yunus lifelong work in microfinance to combat poverty. Since 1997, Grameen Bank, the nonprofit financial institution he founded in Bangladesh, has lent billions of dollars to poor people, mostly women, to start their own businesses. Yunus ideas are incompatible with ... the venture capital model. Some people tell me Not all human beings are entrepreneurs, he said. Some have that capability. Others do not have that capability. I say Why do you say that? You distort them to make them workers. You already ruined them, giving their mind this idea of job. Is a poor woman in Bangladesh who cleans peoples homes any less of an entrepreneur than Mark Zuckerberg? The only difference is that Facebook got millions of dollars in venture capital whereas the woman received a $5 loan from Grameen Bank to buy a vacuum cleaner and a mop. There is no such bank for poor people in America to start businesses, let alone open a savings and checking account.

Note: Read more on the empowering microcredit movement and the inspiring work of Muhammad Yunus.


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