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Nobel winner Muhamad Yunus lead Bangladesh’s interim govt

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus has been chosen to lead Bangladesh’s interim government after the country’s former prime minister Sheik Hasina
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus

DHAKA: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus has been chosen to lead Bangladesh’s interim government after the country’s former prime minister Sheik Hasina resigned and fled the country following weeks of violent unrest.

A well-known critic of Ms Hasina, Mr Yunus called the day of Ms Hasina’s departure Bangladesh’s “second liberation day”.

Who is Muhammad Yunus?

Yunus was born in 1940 in Chittagong, a port city in southeastern Bangladesh, according to his profile on the Nobel Prize website.

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He studied at Dhaka University, before receiving the prestigious Fulbright scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University in the United States, where he received a Ph.D. in economics.

In 1972, a year after Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan, he returned to teach at Chittagong University.

But disaster soon struck. A severe famine swept the country in 1974, wiping out an estimated 1.5 million people.

Anti-government protesters display Bangladesh’s national flag after storming former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s palace in Dhaka on August 5, 2024

“I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the university classroom, in the backdrop of a terrible famine in Bangladesh. Suddenly, I felt the emptiness of those theories in the face of crushing hunger and poverty,” Yunus said in his 2006 Nobel lecture after receiving the award.

“I wanted to do something immediate to help people around me, even if it was just one human being, to get through another day with a little more ease,” he said.

He began providing small loans out of pocket to the poorest residents in his community – eventually founding the Grameen Bank in 1983, which would become a world leader in alleviating poverty through microlending.

The bank quickly grew, with different branches and similar models now operating worldwide.

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Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, after lending a total of about $6 billion in housing, student and micro-enterprise loans, and specifically in support of Bangladeshi women.

He is also the founder of the Yunus Centre, a Dhaka-based think tank that helps develop new social businesses.

Some critics have cast a skeptical eye on Yunus and the Grameen Bank, arguing that some microlenders’ high interest rates had impoverished borrowers as the lenders made big profits from small loans.