We con­grat­u­late Dr. Muham­mad Yunus as he will soon receive a Medal of Free­dom from U.S. Pres­i­dent Barack Obama. The medal is the high­est civil­ian honor in the U.S.. Yunus will receive the award in recog­ni­tion for his pio­neer­ing work in micro­cre­dit. He first came up with the idea of giv­ing small loans to poor peo­ple with­out col­lat­eral back in the 1970s.

From Micro­fi­nance Focus, we find this reprint of an inter­view con­ducted in March with Dr. Yunus.

MF FOCUS: Micro­fi­nance is an estab­lished and recog­nised instru­ment to fight poverty today. Many peo­ple are con­fi­dent and hope that poverty can be elim­i­nated through it. Isn’t it too sim­ple just to rely on microfinance?

Dr. Yunus: You don’t have to. Nobody is forc­ing you to do that. If some­body wants to do Micro­cre­dit, fine. I wouldn’t say this is some­thing every­body should have. Nobody says it is the only solu­tion. Human beings are very multi-dimensional. Micro­fi­nance is one of the many, many things.

MF FOCUS: Social busi­ness is an addi­tional way. Do you iden­tify enough poten­tial for social busi­ness to make a real dif­fer­ence, globally?

Dr. Yunus: Yes of course. Def­i­nitely it is a global and not a local issue. There are two kinds of busi­nesses: One is busi­ness to make money, the other busi­ness is to change the world. This one is with the inten­tion of chang­ing the world and not to have any per­sonal gain from that. It is all ded­i­cated to make a dif­fer­ence. It is address­ing a social issue, to resolve it. You can do that.

MF FOCUS: What are the fac­tors that make social busi­nesses successful?

Dr. Yunus: A good busi­ness plan, good ideas and use the cre­ativ­ity in the most cre­ative way.

MF FOCUS: Micro­fi­nance as well as Social busi­nesses have to be highly effi­cient. How is it pos­si­ble to main­tain or re-introduce the social mis­sion back into microfinance?

Dr. Yunus: When­ever some­thing gets pop­u­lar, actu­ally catches atten­tion, there are peo­ple who take advan­tage of that and mis­use it. It hap­pens in every­thing. When Big brands are pop­u­lar, it gets imi­tated by fake ones. Same thing hap­pens with micro­cre­dit. Peo­ple name it micro­cre­dit but in fact it is not micro­cre­dit. It is some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent.
Peo­ple have to be made aware of what is micro­cre­dit and why it is impor­tant to stick to the real micro­cre­dit and not the one which has a dif­fer­ent moti­va­tion. But while you are look­ing at the micro­cre­dit itself, even good peo­ple may have wrong ideas, which makes them shift away from the whole idea, the mis­sion. We have to be very care­ful and remind our­selves, what is our mis­sion. That is why we have meet­ings (Sa-dhan con­fer­ence) like this, to redis­cover your mis­sion and then re-adjust your work to the mission.

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