Muhammad Yunus
FATHER OF MICROLENDING: FOUNDER, GRAMEEN BANK; WINNER, NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
Capitalism has been interpreted to be based on greed. But while human beings are selfish, they’re also selfless. Why is the latter part discarded from the interpretation? We’re increasingly seeing social businesses, or nondividend businesses, whose entire objective is to solve problems rather than make money, being born in many parts of the world. In social businesses, profits are recycled inside the company itself to continue work on a problem. Investors get to recoup their money but nothing more, other than the enjoyment of what they’ve done. Making money is a happiness; making other people happy is a super-happiness.
An example: We’ve started Grameen Shakti, or “Grameen Energy,” to bring electricity to rural Bangladesh. We tell people, “Whatever money you spend on kerosene every month, give that money to us, and we’ll give you electricity.” And we use their money to finance their solar home system—and after three years, they get to keep it without any other payments. We’ve created 2 million solar-powered rural homes, the world’s largest off-grid system, and customers can’t believe it—they can now have television and charge mobile phones. It’s so successful, many competitors have sprung up—which we welcome, because we are a social business, and those competitors help solve the problem.
In Bangladesh, for the last three years, we have been asking unemployed young people to come up with their own moneymaking business ideas, and we invest in them. We become the social business venture capital fund for them. We assure them that none of them will be rejected, only the implementation-ready ones will get funded. Now we fund 1,500 new entrepreneurs each month. This number keeps growing every month. Nineteen thousand businesses have already been funded. Success rate is 99.5%. We believe all human beings are born as entrepreneurs. They are not born to work for somebody else. Their early history is about being hunters, gatherers and problem-solvers. It remained as an essential part of our DNA; we are not job-seekers, we are job creators. Jobseeking is a wrong turn in our history.