Europe Decade of Yunus Meetings

Oslo Dec 06 - Nobel Prize committee welcomes modern Gandhi - celebrates definition of everyone an entrepreneur and welcomes social business mapping

Horst Köhler, President of Germany, June 2007 ... G8 dialogues .. & University of Karlsruhe on invitation of the president of the university

Feb 15 08 - main Yunus bookday london - : see my biggest mistake blog entry 30 december 08; also one of the empowering speech transcripts of the year at london school of economics -col 3 of this page

Nov08 Yunus SMBA Masterclass Year I Event 6, Glasgow

Dec 08 Oxford -1 Why is SOCIAL BUSINESS
the most exciting entrepreneurial game people play ... Transcripts of Dr Yunus lectures : Adam Smith Glasgow; Sheldonian Oxford - .. more

April 08 - Number 10 London with PM Gordon Brown

audio & video of yunus lse speech Future capitalism booktour launch feb 15, 2008

Nov08 Monaco: Muhammad Yunus devait justement partager la table du prince Albert II ...Concept révolutionnaire dans le capitalisme... et nouveau pour Monaco. Pourquoi Muhammad Yunus a tenu hier à s'exprimer en Principauté ? « Monaco est connue pour sa philanthropie active. Ici, il y a des gens riches et généreux. Je suis venu leur donner des idées. Cet angle philanthropique pourrait être plus efficace avec le social business. Si Monaco se lance et endosse ce rôle, cela pourrait avoir un impact international »,

Dec08 Paris Muhammad Yunus, fondateur de la Grameen Bank, la banque des déshérités au Bangladesh, et Franck Riboud, aux commandes de Danone,se sont retrouvés vendredi à Paris pour lancer la chaire HEC "entreprise et pauvreté".

1 April 2008, Paris; Yunus and President Sarkozy meet, announce SMBA at HEc business school ; later Yunus announces Future Capitalism Partnership in water with Veolia

18 May 2004, Paris - President Chirac confers Order of Legion of Honour on Dr Yunus

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Comment by chris macrae on December 8, 2008 at 9:59am

Times London 1998

TIMES (london) October 31 1998

Bangladesh's famous financier uses micro-credit to bring wealth to the
underprivileged of many nations, reports Rosemary Righter

Professor Muhammad Yunus in London this week on the publication of his new
book

Visionary banker sets free powerless poor

If you went to see a Western banker after a natural disaster had wiped out
half his business clients, you would be in for a grim hour. That is
exactly the position that Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Bangladesh's
Grameen Bank, is in. This year's floods, the worst in the country's
history, covered half the land and affected 25 million people. But
Professor Yunus is totally, amazingly, unflapped.

He is a paradox, a personally modest man in traditional dress who lives
simply in a small flat "over the shop", an ambitious businessman and a
visionary convinced that he has picked one of the locks that imprison the
poor. His key is credit - minute sums, borrowed mainly by illiterate
women, to set up the smallest imaginable enterprises.

He calls it micro-credit. And it works. After 24 years spent fighting the
sceptics, Grameen is a $2.5 billion (#1.5 billion) business. Professor
Yunus could easily have prospered as one of the ilite band of
international economists that he has, instead, spent much of his life
puzzling and annoying with heretical ideas about the bankability of the
unbankable. His heart is plainly, movingly, soft, but there is nothing
soft-centred about his economics. They make Margaret Thatcher sound like a
social worker.

I had just finished Banker to the Poor*, the book he has written with Alan
Jolis. Not only does it read as swiftly as a thriller, it turns the dreary
science of development economics inside out. It is solidly in favour of
capitalist free markets, with the novel twist that it identifies capital
as the ally of the poor. It distrusts big government in general and the
welfare state in particular. It excoriates the wastage, incompetence and
corruption of much international aid. And it is charged with the
conviction that all human beings, no matter what their handicap, are able
to help themselves.

"You are the Adam Smith of the poor", I began, slightly wondering what he
would say. A brilliant smile: "Oh, thank you. Thank you." Even so, I felt
I had to qualify what I'd said. After all, this man spends his life
fighting poverty. I added something about the unread bits of The Wealth of
Nations, on social responsibility. I need not have worried.

"We need far less government. It would be wonderful if you didn't need it,
if you could just stick with it for formal occasions, like your Royal
Family. People were once afraid that they couldn't manage without absolute
rulers. Maybe we will find out that, except for justice, the police and
defence, we can do without government too. The public sector is on the way
out. And that is because it has failed." But what about the Bangladesh
disaster? How could people already so poor pick up the pieces?

"This won't destroy us. It gives us an opportunity. Just think of their
enterprise. The flood-water stood there for ten weeks and they survived,
with no income, using whatever capital, assets, they had, and now they are
going back to rebuild. Disasters like this reveal the pride and strength
and creativity of the poorest; and that is what Grameen helps them to
prove. Humans are designed to do a lot more than merely survive."

How can a bank help? "We have standard procedures. We have to; local
cyclones and floods happen all the time." So branches can declare a
disaster area without asking Dhaka - "that would be too slow" - and turn
into humanitarian agencies. Bank staff suspend loan repayments and instead
fan out to provide food, medicines, "whatever people need".

"But they keep a detailed record of what each person has received. And
whe