ver more than four decades, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank has disbursed some $37 billion in collateral-free loans to over 10 million of the world’s poorest people. But founder Muhammad Yunus still remembers the first $5 he ever lent. It was 1974 and Yunus had recently returned from a teaching position at Middle Tennessee State University to his native Bangladesh, which three years earlier had won independence from Pakistan in a blood-soaked .
Yunus was determined to contribute to the fledgling nation’s development and took a post as head of economics at Chittagong University, though quickly became disillusioned with academia given the rampant poverty he encountered daily amid a brutal famine. “Economics is a meaningless subject,” he thought, Yunus, now 83, recalls in a Zoom interview with TIME. “These are empty ideas, which have not taught me how to help poor people protect themselves from hunger.
” Yunus wandered the mud lanes of the villages near his campus looking for practical solutions. At one, he spied a woman making elegant bamboo stools outside a tumbledown shack. “I saw there’s a complete difference between the stools she’s making and the house she lives in,” Yunus recalls.
The woman was initially hesitant to speak to Yunus, abiding by traditional Islamic mores, though he eventually coaxed out of her that the materials she needed cost the equivalent of $5, which she secured from a loan shark. But instead of then selling her stools on the open market,.
