Muhammad Yunus

Nobel Peace Prize winner Professor Muhammad Yunus was named ‘one of the greatest  entrepreneurs  of our time’ by Fortune Magazine in 2012 in recognition of his ‘constant innovation and enterprise’. He founded Grameen Bank, and more than 50 other companies in Bangladesh, which have led to significant social change in the region. An excellent keynote speaker, Muhammad inspires audiences across the world.

His concept of social business is defined as a non-dividend company dedicated to solving social problems, such as healthcare, education, sanitation, water pollution, unemployment, environmental degradation, etc.

The pioneering concepts of microcredit and microfinance evolved from a desire to do good in the world, instilled into him by his mother, who would always help poor people who came to the door, from a very young age. Born in Bangladesh in 1940 in a village in Chittagong, the business centre of what was then Eastern Bengal, Muhammad was encouraged by his father to pursue further education, and in 1965 he received Fulbright Scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University, USA, where he completed his Ph.D. in economics in 1969.

Upon his return to Bangladesh, Muhammad started to experiment with providing collateral free loans to the poor as part of a project called Grameen Bank, which became a fully-fledged bank for providing loans to the poor, mostly women, in rural Bangladesh, in 1983. Today Grameen Bank has millions of borrowers, the overwhelming majority of which are women who depend on this support.

Professor Yunus has written about his concepts in his books which cover issues of battling world poverty, the future of capitalism and social business.

In 2006 he was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Grameen Bank.

Professor Yunus has received over 50 honorary degrees from universities across several countries, as well as countless awards, and is one of only seven people in history to have received the Nobel Peace Prize, the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom and the United States Congressional Gold Medal.

Invited by the United Nations Secretary General to serve as an MDG Advocate, Professor Yunus was chosen by the Wharton School of Business as one of 'The 25 Most Influential Business Persons of the Past 25 Years'. AsiaWeek selected him as one of ‘Twenty Great Asians’, and in 2006, Time magazine listed him under ‘60 years of Asian Heroes’ as one of the top 12 business leaders. In 2010, The New Statesman listed him as one of ‘The World's 50 Most Influential Figures’.

Creating a world without poverty and leading the way for social entrepreneurs, Muhammad’s keynote message is truly inspiring.