First of all, Muhammad Yunus was born in Chittagong, Bangladesh in June 28, 1940. His father was a jeweler and his mother, Sofia Khatun, was the main person who has influenced Muhammad's life. She was always kind to the poor and hungry people who used to come to their house asking for money or food. This story tells us how important is the role of a good mother who raises her children. She actually presents the world's most admirable leaders and she is a main contributor in shaping history for the coming generations.
In 1965, he earned a scholarship to study Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1972 he returned to Bangladesh as the head of the economic department at the University of Chittagong. After observing the famine of 1974, Muhammad became involved with poverty reduction and established a rural economic program as a research project. While he was giving lectures about fancy economic theories, people were dying at the street. He said describing his feelings: "I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation". So, he decided to change his teaching method to be more practical. He used to give his students a practical projects on the field, in the village of Jobra which is close to the university where he is teaching, to keep them observing the actual needs of poor people and find them appropriate solutions from the economical prospective.
Once, Muhammad was talking to a poor lady who makes chairs from bamboo wood, which comes from a common tree in Bangladesh. That lady was borrowing money from someone who was taking high interest from her. She was working 12 hours a day to pay back the money with all the interests and almost nothing left for her to live a better life, or to save some, or even to expand her business. That way, which conflict with the basic notion of the islamic financial system, was one of the main reasons that kept the poor people poor and made the rich people more rich. While the islamic financial system aims to encourage the productivity of the market and never permits people to gain more money just by lending them to people and take it back with interests just as a matter of time without any production. With the aid of his students, Muhammad had inspected the situation of 42 villages around the city and decided to lend small amounts of money from his own pocket to some worker women with no interests nor guarantees, and without pointing a due date to pay the money back. That experience showed back that it works perfectly, and poor women situation is getting better and they all paid back the money. Later on, Muhammad had tried to convince the central bank and the commercial banks to adopt his idea, but they replied that poor people are not eligible for taking loans and there is no guarantee that they can pay the money back.
At the year 1976, Muhammad took a personal loan from the bank to start his project and prove his theories. Consequently, during three years of experience, he succeeded in improving the situation of 500 families of poor people in Bangladesh. That turned to be a bright sufficient prove for the central bank to decide in 1979 to support the new project "Grameen Bank" which means: the bank of the village. In 1981, the Grameen Bank expanded to cover 5 more territories. Moreover, it shows in each stage the efficiency of the successful application of micro credit.
In 1983, the Grameen Bank was serving more than 59000 clients through 86 branches. At that level, Muhammad had decided to end his academic career and pursue his dream with the Grameen Bank, the dream of creating a world without poverty.
