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Yunus: Obama’s microcredit “imprinting”
Trust. In the belief that things, that the world, can change. According to Muhammad Yunus, founder of the first bank in the world to lend money to the poor and without any financial guarantee, winning people’s trust was Obama’s greatest challenge. A c
di Staff
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Muhammad Yunus, Nobel peace prize winner and microcredit pioneer, knows a lot about trust and the benefits it can bring society. He has been telling people for years, ever since he founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976: “Nothing here ever works, except for microcredit, which runs like a Swiss clock”. A positive feedback loop – unlike charity, lending microcredit on trust awakens the entrepreneurial spirit locked within us all, including beggars.
His faith in the USA’s recently elected president stems from the imprinting he believes Obama to have received as a young child in Indonesia, where his mother worked tirelessly to help women escape poverty through microcredit. In an interview published in the Corriere della Sera, Yunus reveals that he was meant to meet Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, at the World conference for women at Beijing in 1995 where she was scheduled to give a talk on the value of giving small loans to women, on how reliable the return of the loans was and the positive impact the loans had on their communities. Unfortunately Barack Obama’s mother was gravely ill and was not able to attend the conference and died only six months later.
According to Yunus, Obama’s victory is not tied to the colour of skin but because he talks about things that people feel intimately. He has become a symbol of hope for the world and the most important thing is that people believe his promise. Whatever happens, continues Yunus, in the next four years is of little consequence, what matters is that people now are looking to him for a new direction.
