Dubai: The man who believes that access to credit should not be limited only to the rich, and that it is a fundamental right, has finally been rewarded for the silent revolution he initiated three decades ago.

Norwegian Noble Prize Committee yesterday awarded Bangladeshi economist Dr Mohammad Younus, 65, and Grameen Bank, the microcredit institution he founded, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006 for popularising microcredit - a scheme of small handout loans paid to the rural poor without collateral security.

"A person doesn't have to be rich to become creditworthy. Credit, he says, should be accepted as a human right," Younus told Gulf News in an earlier interview.

"Credit is the last hope left to those faced with absolute poverty. That is why I believe that the right to credit should be recognised as a fundamental human right," he said.

Younus, who has won a number of international awards, has almost single-handedly revolutionised the concept of microcredit by expanding the network of Grameen Bank.

The bank has handed out $5.72 billion (Dh21 billion) since its inception to 6.61 million people and been repaid $5.07 billion (Dh18.6 billion).

Women account for 97 per cent of the loan takers. Grameen Bank has 2,226 branches, works in 71,371 villages and has a total staff of 18,795.

Grameen Bank is the realisation of a dream of Younus, who in the mid-1970s undertook an unconventional initiative to fight poverty in rural society by empowering villagers, especially women, through the distribution of microcredit or short-term loans.

Within a few years his humble initiative brought thousands of rural families into a credit network and transformed it into a bank.

"Our own internal survey shows that 51 per cent of our 3.6 million members have crossed the poverty line, judged on the basis of ten indicators," he said.

Profile

Dubai Mohammad Younus was born in 1940 in Chittagong, the business centre of what was then Eastern Bengal. He was the third of 14 children, of whom five died in their infancy.

Educated in Chittagong, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, United States.

In 1972 he became head of the Economics Department at Chittagong University. He is the founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank. In 1997, Younus led the world's first microcredit Summit in Washington, DC.

The beginning In 1974, Younus led his students on a field trip to a poor village. They interviewed a woman who made bamboo stools, and learnt that she had to borrow the equivalent of 15 penny to buy raw bamboo for each stool made. After repaying the middleman, sometimes at rates as high as 10 per cent a week, she was left with a penny of profit margin.

Against counsel

Realising that there must be something terribly wrong with the economics he was teaching, Younus took matters into his own hands, and from his pocket lent the equivalent of £17 (Dh113) to 42 basket-weavers.

Against the advice of banks and the government, Younus carried on giving out "micro-loans", and in 1983 formed the Grameen Bank, meaning "rural bank" on the principles of trust and solidarity.

Today, on any working day, Grameen collects an average of $1.5 million (Dh5.5 million) in weekly installments.