 Here we were talking about economic development, about investing billions of dollars in various programs, and I could see it wasn't billions of dollars people needed right away. |
| Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame. |
| Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women. |
| They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy. |
| Business money is limitless. |
| I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation. |
| I had no idea that I would ever get involved with something like lending money to poor people, given the circumstances in which I was working in Bangladesh. |
| My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see. |
| But we have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities. |
| I wanted to give money to people like this woman so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell their product at the price which the markets gave them - which was much higher than what the trader was giving them. |
| There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences. |
| I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people. The bankers almost fell over. |
| Poverty is unnecessary. |
| I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there were 42 names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was shocked. |
