Microcredit and Poverty Alleviation

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Microcredit is a financial innovation that is considered to have originated with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and Muhammad Yunus is its founder. This Bank offers collateral free loan to rural poor women. Women are afforded the opportunity of education and access to health care, reduced unemployment, so that their families and communities prosper. The future of the Microcredit is very bright now because it plays an important role for the development of poor families. This system is being introduced in both developing and developed countries of the world. The relationship between Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen bank and women’s lives is important because he helps poor women to be independent and economically support their family. Because of microcredit women are free to earn a living and start small businesses; they become drivers of economic growth.

Muhammad Yunus is an economist from Chittagong University and was born in 1940 in Chittagong, Bangladesh. He was the third of nine children of his parents and educated in Chittagong. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. In 1972 he became head of the Economics Department at Chittagong University. He is the founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank. In 1997, Professor Yunus led the world’s first Micro Credit Summit in Washington, DC. Muhammad Yunus’s project has grown to serve a total of seven million families in Bangladesh with loans, totaling six billion dollars. There are over 250 institutions in100 countries that operate off Grameen micro-credit principles (Biography). Yunus developed his revolutionary micro-credit system with the belief that it would be a cost effective and scalable weapon to fight pover...

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