Ismail Serageldin* pays tribute to the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner who will be receiving his award On Sunday, 10 December 2006, a Bangladeshi economist and the institution he founded 30 years ago will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. Muhammad Yunus, known to many as the "banker to the poor," started his journey toward creating the Grameen Bank in 1976 with a loan from his pocket to 42 desperately poor people in Bangladesh. The total loan amounted to US $27 -- less than US $1 per person. One of the 42 borrowers was a woman who made bamboo stools and a profit of just two pennies a day. Professor Yunus was shocked to learn that the moneylender, who provided the loan, required the woman to sell the finished stools back to him at a price that barely covered the cost of the bamboo, thus resulting in a life of extreme poverty. With a loan from Prof. Yunus, the woman could now sell her product to the highest bidder and her profit skyrocketed from two pennies a day to US $1.25 a day. Muhammad Yunus was trained as an economist, not a banker, and over the last 30 years he has broken countless rules of banking and other disciplines. He provided loans to the poor, not the rich; to women, not men; in small amounts, not large; and without collateral or any paperwork. The world would be a much harsher place if these rules had never been broken, if no one anywhere had ever bothered to question the notion that the poor could not use or repay a small loan, had not questioned the myth that the poor are not credit worthy, or had not questioned the myth that says you cannot give a loan without collateral. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee is celebrating the work and breakthroughs of Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank, and all the other revolutionaries who have pioneered this remarkable intervention. This revolution has spread to Egypt. Since the 1990s, much of the microcredit provided in Egypt came via NGOs which served thousands of borrowers and had millions of US dollars disbursed in loans. Today, there are many interesting micro-finance activities supported by institutions such as the National Bank for Development, the Banque du Caire, the Social Fund for Development and small Grameen Bank replication programmes throughout Egypt. One of Egypt's excellent micro-enterprise lending programmes is in Alexandria and is run by the Alexandria Business Association (ABA). ABA Small and Micro Enterprise program works through 34 branches in Alexandria, Kafr El-Sheikh, Beheira, Marsa Matrouh and Monoufeyia. For its outreach programme, ABA capitalises on the tight social networks in densely populated areas and uses word of mouth to publicise its micro-finance services. Stemming from ABA's organisational commitment to extend credit and non- financial services to the poorest of the poor, especially poor women, the "Blossoms of Micro Enterprises" programme was launched in late 1999. One of the programme's most inspiring success stories is that of a female client from Alexandria, who started with a EGP 100 loan in 2001. In less than five years, she established her own small clothing factory and could afford not only to fully repay her loans, send her children to school and raise her family's standard of living, but also to employ three other workers in her project. She now sells her products to many clothing shops in Egypt. Many other micro-finance programmes in Egypt are being supported by the Sawiris Foundation, the analysis of which has shown such programmes to be enormously powerful means of combating poverty and creating jobs. Some of the poorest women in Egypt are also being reached by Grameen- like programmes, such as the "Tadamon" (Solidarity) micro-finance programme affiliated to the Women's Health Improvement Association in Egypt. Last month, Professor Yunus joined more than 2,000 delegates from 112 countries at the Global Microcredit Summit 2006 in Halifax, Canada. At that Summit, delegates launched Phase II of the Campaign with two new goals for 2015: - reaching 175 million of the world's poorest families with microcredit, affecting 875 million family members; - ensuring 100 million families rise above the US $1 a day threshold, lifting half a billion people out of extreme poverty. This is a challenge to the micro-finance movement in Egypt and around the world. We have the potential to expand dramatically, but can we also make a profound contribution to the Millennium Development Goal of cutting US $1 a day poverty in half by 2015? As Muhammad Yunus says, "Poverty does not belong in civilised human society. Its proper place is in a museum." Let us work to use the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize as an impetus to put poverty in the museums, where it belongs. * The writer is director-general of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
