Micro-lender bringing his vision of helping the poor to D.C., By Jonathan O’Connell, April 19, 2010, Washington Post: “In 1976, Muhammad Yunus began making loans of a dollar or less to poor farmers and textile makers in his native Bangladesh. Thirty years later, he and the nonprofit micro-lender he founded, Grameen Bank, shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. To date, Grameen has lent more than $9 billion to more than 8 million borrowers, almost all in Bangladesh. Now Yunus plans to bring low-interest credit to the poor and unemployed in Washington. Grameen America, a U.S. offshoot, is already lending in Queens and Brooklyn, N.Y., and Omaha and has lent to more than 2,500 American borrowers. Yunus says that although the United States is one of the wealthiest places in the world, the need for small, low-cost loans is evident in the number of Americans coming to Grameen to borrow money…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty