Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank

Muhammad Yunus, a university economics teacher in Bangladesh, was in 1976, in his own words, 'not happy with what I was teaching.' Reality did not match the 'brilliant' theories. He decided to go out to the surrounding villages and talk to the poor people - mostly women - selling their work at the market. He met one very poor woman who was earning 2 US cents a day making bamboo stools. Since she didn't have the capital to buy bamboo from the market for 20 cents, a trader lent her the money, with the condition that she would sell her product to him at the price he decided.
'I was shocked by the simplicity of the solution which the situation required,' he later said. Within a year he had created the Grameen Bank, which now works in 34,000 villages (out of some 68,000 villages in the country) and serves nearly two million borrowers - 94 per cent of them women. His vision was clear: Poverty is not created by the poor.' Rather, he surmised, 'poverty is created by the existing world system which denies fair chances to the poor'.
Access to investment capital - credit - is one potent weapon to help the poor fight their way out of poverty through their own efforts. The Grameen Bank which Yunus created lends money for any kind of income generating activity. The average loan size is around US$100, lasts one year, and is repaid in weekly instalments at a 20 per cent interest rate. In 1994, nearly half a billion US dollars was disbursed in housing and income generating loans with a roughly 99 per cent repayment rate.
To get a loan from Grameen the potential borrower selects five people. This group acts as a loan committee as well as a monitoring, supervising and problem-solving body.
Muhammad Yunus presented the approach of the Grameen Bank to UNESCO in February 1995 where he was personally hosted by the Director General and met with

an assembly of UNESCO staff. During the visit, he held a special meeting with the Culture of Peace Programme at which it was agreed that there are many points of convergence of the two programmes which will be pursued in the future.

Women's organizations

A leading role in the construction of a culture of peace is being played by women's organizations. Here, the actions of one such organization will be described, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
Having been recognized with Nobel Peace Prizes to two of its founding members, its first President, Jane Addams, and its first Secretary Emily Greene Balch, WILPF works around the world to bring together women of different political and philosophical tendencies united in their determination to study, make known, and help abolish the political, social, economic and psychological causes of war and to work for a constructive peace'.
A recent issue of the WILPF newsletter International Peace Update' considers the role played by women in the transformation from a culture of militarism to a culture of peace. It states that women in all societies the transmitters of the history, customs and traditions of their people are the key to the development of a culture of peace, which cannot be superimposed upon society but must evolve from it.' Special attention is given to education, beginning in the home, which should treat history not as a tale of battles, but of the accumulation of human experience, of labour, of the efforts to harness nature, of compassion and construction, of artistic expression in which both women and men have their part. Not only teaching but art, music, news reporting, television programmes, games and recreation need to be so oriented.' Suggestions are given to help move toward a culture of peace, as reproduced here in the accompanying box.