Produce job creators instead of job seekers, says Grameen Bank founder

YANGON (Myanmar): Dr Muhammad Yunus, the founding father of micro-credit that won him Nobel Prize, has blamed governments and the education system for the rampant unemployment as they tend to produce job-seekers instead of job-creators.
Speaking at the annual world congress of International Press Institute, the Bangladeshi economist who founded a bank for the poor also came down hard on the global banking system saying it had been skewed in favor of the rich as the banks are supposed to lend money to those who already have it.
“Poverty is imposed by the system itself that doesn’t allow the poor to excel in life,” he said. His bank, Grameen Bank, in contrast gives loan to people too poor to offer collateral in return with around 1500 branches throughout Bangladesh in addition to 90 branches in the United States with 25,000 borrowers of average $1500 loan in New York City alone.
“Why not create a system where no poor is rejected, no beggar is rejected,” said Yunus whose model of micro-credit has been adopted by more than 250 financial institutions in 100 countries. What he preached is being practiced by his bank that extends loan only to the poorest of borrowers.
To qualify for the loan, a villager must demonstrate that his/her family owns less than one and a half acres of land. The preferred lenders of the bank are women that not only form 97% of borrowers, but they also have representation in the board of the bank.
The bank lends out one and a half billion dollars each year to around 8.5 million people, mostly women, and that figure is increasing every year. The saving in Grameen Bank, deposited by the borrowers, is exceeding the total loan they get. We have created a new kind of relationship between the bank and the borrower and it is trust-based, Yunus said.
Talking about poverty, his key concern, Nobel laureate said governments don’t encourage entrepreneurship.“Since their approach is job-oriented, they claim about the number of jobs they have created instead of entrepreneurs,” he said.
Emphasizing radical shift in policy for curbing poverty, Yunus said they must think about creating entrepreneurs, the men of their own destiny. “Why talk about unemployment and why not about entrepreneurship,” he asked. “The education system needs to be re-engineered for producing job-creators instead of job-seekers.” He urged running micro-credit as a social business in order to eliminate poverty and not on the commercial lines. In a social business, he explained, money goes out, does the work and comes back. It’s sustainable.
Yunus said entrepreneurial talent is quite human. “All human beings are entrepreneurs by nature. Asking them to take a job is very artificial,” he said. When we used to be in the caves, he explained his point, we didn’t send job applications from cave number one to cave number five.
Make the word ‘unemployment’ unemployed by replacing it with entrepreneurship, he said. Asked why leaders, though know how to go about it, still refuse to use his recipe, Yunus said they tend to blame external challenges to justify status quo whereas the way to curb poverty requires positive conditions from within.