The new Yunus Cen­tre at the Asian Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy will be a school that will exper­i­ment with ways of end­ing poverty. Nobel Piece Prize win­ner Muham­mad Yunus has estab­lished the school in Thai­land to help develop his ideas on non-profit/non-loss busi­nesses that help the poor.

From Chan­nel News Asia, reporter Ana­suya Sanyal gives us more details on the new school.

In devel­op­ing coun­tries in Asia, 690 mil­lion peo­ple live off less than US$1 a day, and many earn their mea­gre liv­ing by sub­sis­tence farm­ing. But the global eco­nomic cri­sis and volatile prices of sta­ple foods have made it all the more dif­fi­cult. Yet there is much that can be done.

Micro­cre­dit pio­neer, Pro­fes­sor Yunus, who is also the founder of Grameen Foun­da­tion, main­tains that tar­geted and sus­tain­able assis­tance can be a vital key to lift­ing peo­ple out of poverty.

He said: “The whole idea of the Yunus Cen­tre is to bring the ideas and the con­cepts that I have been pro­mot­ing and the imag­i­na­tion of cre­at­ing a new kind of world. The one descrip­tion of the world I want to see is a world where nobody will be a poor per­son — because there is no rea­son why any­body, any­where in the world, should go through the mis­ery and indig­nity of being a poor person.”

At the Yunus Cen­tre at AIT, schol­ars will be able to research ways to improve the lives of the poor and apply what they have learnt in those communities.

A pre­cur­sor to the new cen­tre is a project which aims to train mid-level gov­ern­ment offi­cials in devel­op­ment issues. And in Laos, this approach has proved effective.

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