In his lat­est com­men­tary, Sam Daley Har­ris touches on the Medal of Free­dom that was awarded to Muham­mad Yunus. Har­ris recounts the story of microcredit’s begin­nings, and how the same con­cept of non-profit/non-loss busi­ness is spread­ing into other ventures.

From The Daily Jour­nal is this snip­pet of Har­ris’ com­men­tary. Har­ris is the founder of the Micro­cre­dit Sum­mit and Results.

He was so shaken by the sight of peo­ple dying of star­va­tion that when he set foot into Jobra, the vil­lage next to his cam­pus, all he wanted to do was to see if he could be of use to one per­son for one day — not 40 mil­lion — just one.

It was in that vil­lage that he met a stool maker who hor­ri­fied him when she explained she earned only 2 cents a day for her beau­ti­ful crafts­man­ship. With no money to buy the bam­boo she needed, Sufia Khatun was forced to bor­row from a money­len­der who demanded that she sell her fin­ished stools back to him at a price he set — a price so low that she made only 2 cents a day profit.

When he asked whether she could earn more if she was freed from the money­len­der, she told him, “Yes I can.” Yunus had a stu­dent look for other vil­lagers who were in the same dilemma. The stu­dent found 42 peo­ple who needed a grand total of $27 to pay off the money­len­der, buy their raw mate­ri­als and sell their wares to the high­est bid­der. That’s right; all they needed was an aver­age of 68 cents each. With her loan of less than $1 the stool-maker’s prof­its soared from 2 cents a day to $1.25 a day.
Adver­tise­ment

Now, Yunus has set his sights on titans of busi­ness and indus­try with his social busi­ness con­cept, and the chair­men of Dan­none, Intel and BASF are beat­ing a “yes we can” path to his door to cre­ate new nonprofit/non-loss busi­nesses that have as their sole goal improv­ing people’s lives. The cor­po­ra­tions can recover their ini­tial invest­ments in the social busi­nesses, but after that, all prof­its are plowed back into these new com­pa­nies. They include a joint ven­ture with Dan­none pro­duc­ing nutri­tion­ally for­ti­fied yogurt for mal­nour­ished vil­lagers, another with BASF pro­duc­ing chem­i­cally treated bed-nets to pro­tect peo­ple from mos­qui­toes car­ry­ing malaria, and still another with Intel bring­ing infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy solu­tions to rural villages.

When the U.S. pres­i­dent shook the hand of the Bangladeshi micro-banker at the White House cer­e­mony last week, Obama touched his own past and the micro­fi­nance work his mother did in Indone­sia. And when Yunus opens the Micro­cre­dit Sum­mit next April in Nairobi, Kenya, the micro-banker from Bangladesh will launch the next phase of micro­fi­nance in the birth­place of Obama’s father and through­out the continent.

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