Muhammad Yunus was born in Bangaldesh in 1940. He studied at Dhaka University in Bangladesh, then received a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University in the United States. He received his PhD in economics from Vanderbilt in 1969 and the following year became an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University.
After the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, Yunus returned to the country to head the economics department at Chittagong University. In 1976, Yunus piloted a microcredit project by providing women in a village near Chittagong with small loans from his personal savings for self-employment. He also secured a bank loan to lend to a larger amount of poor in the area. By 1982, the pilot project had 28,000 members. The next year it was renamed Grameen Bank ("Village Bank").
Yunus was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Grameen Bank, for their efforts to create economic and social development. He was the first Bangladeshi to ever receive a Nobel Prize. Grameen Bank has grown to provide loans to over 7 million clients in more than 82,000 villages in Bangladesh, 97% of whom are women.
Yunus delivered the Beatty Lecture on October 1, 2010, titled "Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity's Most Pressing Needs".
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