Muhammad Yunus

Mohammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi economist and entrepreneur. Nicknamed the “banker of poor”, he founded the first microcredit institution, the Grameen Bank. Thanks to this concept he won the Nobel Prize for peace in 2006.

He is the third of fourteen children; he spent the early years in his native village and then his family move to Chittagong, the second city of Bangladesh, where his father opened a jewellery store.


Attended a primary school Lamabazar and Chittagong collegiate school, Yunus was also a boy scout. Thanks to an international boy scouts exchange, he travelled in Europe, Japan, Philippines, Middle East and North America.

In 1957, he obtained a bachelor in economics at Dhaka University, and one year later he got a master in arts. Then he became teacher in economics at Chittagong College.
At 21 years old, he became entrepreneur, establishing the first high-tech factory for packaging and printing of all East Pakistan. The concept was an amazing success but he decided to give the management part to his two brothers in order to move to United States to get a PhD.


After a master at university of Colorado, Yunus started a PhD at Vanderbilt private University in Tennessee. He met his first wife, a young American with Russian origin, Vera Forestenko. They married in 1970, and seven years later they had a daughter called Monica.

In 1980, Yunus divorce and remarried Afrozi Yunus, a professor of physics at Jahangirnagar University, with whom he had a second daughter, Dina Yunus.


After a PhD in economics, he got a job at Middle Tennessee State University. During a liberation war in Bangladesh, Yunus decided to support the separatists.

In 1971, Bangladesh’s independence is proclaimed, and Yunus decided to come back to his Country, leaving his job as university professor. He became head of the economics department of Chittagong University. Against famine, which destroys his country, he decided to focus on the poor life style of villages near to University.

With many students, he created a group of “research and action”, which its first work focused on agricultural issues. The young professor understood that much problems faced by poor farmers are linked to difficulties of access to capital. For this reason Yunus proposed a “micro-loan” (between 30 and 50 dollars) to a few dozen of villages, using his own money.

The effect of these loans is very soon positive on the material situation of the beneficiaries, and without difficulties of reimburse. In 1977 Yunus decided to create his own program, called “Grameen” (means village).

This is an instant success, at first in Bangladesh, where Grammen took bank status in 1983, and in other many countries where the model was exported since 1989.