Yunus told the Guardian he had come under 20 years of pressure from the Bangladeshi government for his work, which is credited with improving the lives of millions<\/a> of poor people, particularly women.<\/p>\n In January, he was sentenced<\/a> to six months\u2019 imprisonment, along with three other people, for violating labour laws at Grameen Telecom, the not-for-profit company he founded in 1983. He is now on bail pending an appeal but has been charged with more than 100 other crimes, all of which he denies.<\/p>\n \u201cThis thing continues and makes my life miserable,\u201d said Yunus. \u201cI can\u2019t concentrate on anything because I\u2019m busy digging up documents to prove that I didn\u2019t do this, documents to prove that I never did that.\u201d<\/p>\n Yunus is credited with pioneering microfinance, a financial service for people locked out of formal banking systems. It allows them to take out small loans to invest in building their own businesses. Piloted in 1976<\/a> among a group of women in a Bangladeshi village who were given small loans without needing collateral, by the mid-2000s it was seen as a key tool for ending poverty<\/a>. Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel peace prize for the work in 2006.<\/p>\n The system\u2019s success in lifting people out of poverty has since been questioned<\/a> and microfinance has been the subject of several scandals<\/a> over lenders charging exploitative interest rates.<\/p>\n In 2011, Yunus was forced to resign from Grameen<\/a> after a campaign led by Bangladeshi politicians. Yunus, who was 70 at the time, was deemed too old to run the bank. He maintains the mandatory retirement age of 60 should not have applied to him as the bank was not a government institution.<\/p>\n The Bangladeshi government has defended<\/a> the action against Yunus, and denies that it represents a misuse of the legal system, accusing the economist of having a \u201cvictim mentality\u201d for claiming he was being personally harassed.<\/p>\n Last year, more than 100 Nobel laureates signed an open letter<\/a> calling for the labour law charges to be suspended. Amnesty International said<\/a> the case was \u201cemblematic of the beleaguered state of human rights in Bangladesh, where the authorities have eroded freedoms and bulldozed critics into submission\u201d.<\/p>\n Alongside the January conviction, Yunus has been charged with corruption, tax evasion and money laundering.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are all false, ask any Bangladeshi. Anybody will know this is all false, fabricated,\u201d Yunus said.<\/p>\n Bangladesh\u2019s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, has accused the microfinance sector of \u201csucking blood<\/a>\u201d from the poor, but it was a speech she made in 2022 during the opening of the country\u2019s long-awaited Padma Bridge that particularly concerned Yunus.<\/p>\n Hasina accused him of blocking progress on the bridge, which had a $1.2bn (\u00a3940m) World Bank loan cancelled in 2012<\/a> over allegations of corruption by Bangladeshi officials. She called for him to be plunged into the river<\/a> to \u201cteach him a lesson\u201d. \u201cIt\u2019s a very dangerous thing we are inviting the people of the country to dunk someone [in the river],\u201d Yunus said. Hasina \u201cpours out her extreme hatred on me\u201d, he added.<\/p>\n Yunus won\u2019t be drawn on the reasons for Hasina\u2019s enmity but it has been linked by others to his aborted attempt<\/a> to launch a political party in 2007.<\/p>\n Despite the threat of imprisonment, the 83-year-old has remained in Bangladesh and is still working to eliminate poverty and unemployment.<\/p>\n He said other countries had offered to host him but he did not want to leave behind his work or his employees. \u201cThis will be all forgotten, removed, destroyed. I don\u2019t want to see that.<\/p>\n \u201cLeave me alone, let me do the thing I want, that I enjoy doing and that people benefit from. It is not for my own interest,\u201d he said. \u201cI enjoy finding out solutions for the problems that we see around us \u2013 global warming, wealth concentration, unemployment, poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n Yunus is still committed to microfinance. He believes any problems are due to a lack of regulation that has allowed unscrupulous dealers to operate.<\/p>\n When done right, he said, the system could give poor people the freedom to improve their lives by building businesses instead of having to subsist on low-paying jobs.<\/p>\n \u201c[With a job] you surrender yourself to somebody else\u2019s wishes for the little money that they give you at the end of the month \u2026 that\u2019s not what human beings are all about. Human beings are not built for serving somebody else. Human beings are very independent, packed with unlimited creative capacity,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cOur institutions have been designed the wrong way. If you have money, you get more money \u2026 but if you have no money, you don\u2019t get any money. So you stay where you are.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat microcredit has done is brought that finance at the lowest possible stage \u2026 finance is the oxygen of entrepreneurship. If you connect finance with people, people suddenly become very active, become alive, his mind starts ticking, he starts creating things. He\u2019s looking at the world in a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Nobel peace laureate and microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus has said that years of fighting what he calls \u201cdirty\u201d politically motivated attacks on his work to alleviate poverty in Bangladesh have made life \u201ctotally miserable\u201d.<\/p>\n Yunus told the Guardian he had come under 20 years of pressure from the Bangladeshi government for his work, which is credited with improving the lives of millions of poor people, particularly women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":219,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-430","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-article","8":"category-south-asia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":531,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions\/531"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"logo](\"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/7f1646a2-efb2-413f-9c3a-56ce85b06ed4-300x102.jpeg\")
Source:<\/strong>
\nhttps:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/global-development\/article\/2024\/jun\/10\/microfinance-pioneer-bangladeshis-muhammad-yunus<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/kamil_ahmed.avif\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n Kaamil Ahmed<\/a><\/h3>\n