“The contribution of the creativity and ingenuity of one person benefits everybody else. One inventor, one discovery, will change the whole of everybody, it touches everybody’s life.”

Professor Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, fueled by the belief that credit is a fundamental human right. The Grameen Bank has advanced to the forefront of a burgeoning world movement toward eradicating poverty through microlending. Replicas of the Grameen Bank model operate in more than 100 countries worldwide. Yunus studied at Dhaka University in Bangladesh, then received a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Vanderbilt and the became an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University. Returning to Bangladesh, he headed the economics department at Chittagong University. Yunus was a member of the International Advisory Group for the Fourth World Conference on Women and has served on the Global Commission of Women's Health, the Advisory Council for Sustainable Economic Development and the UN Expert Group on Women and Finance.