Muhammad Yunus

1984 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Community Leadership from Bangladesh. Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983, when all his previous efforts to allow ordinary people to participate in making the decisions affecting them proved inadequate. Even efforts to arrest a process of pauperization that left ever more villagers without hope, and the traditional poverty-focused programs proved incapable of "breaking out" of the paradigm about the poor – that the poor cannot save, will not work together, have no marketable skills, are uninterested in change and the women are not allowed to keep what they earn. Thus the life of the poor is a vicious self-perpetuating quandary, and population growth multiplies their burdens.

Yunus' solution is the Grameen (village) Bank Project (GBP) for the landless. He was resolute in his belief that credit is a fundamental human right. His objective was to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them and by teaching them a few sound financial principles so they could help themselves.