Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus suggested Taiwan should set up “social business centers” in universities to address social problems such as poverty.
Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank and the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said he has been promoting the implementation of social business worldwide and urging people to get involved in enterprises with a public interest.
“Since I am here, I am hoping some universities would set up some kind of social business center, which some universities in other countries have done,” the 72-year-old Bangladeshi economist said at a forum in Taipei on Wednesday.
Yunus said he hoped that some Taiwanese companies would establish social business groups to take a proactive approach to social responsibility.
Yunus has been promoting the social business model because he says he believes it can enable even those with limited resources to build enterprises with global influence.
The concept of social business is business that has the potential to act as an agent for change in the world, Yunus said.
“Poverty is not distributed evenly around the world. Some countries that have enjoyed economic success over the past three decades have paid a heavy price,” he said.
“The economic growth has worsened social problems,” Yunus said. “Unfettered markets in their current form are not meant to solve social problems. Social business is the most logical thing to do.”
Known as the “Banker of the Poor,” Yunus is on a five-day Asian tour, with Taiwan being his last stop.
Yunus and Grameen Bank, a bank that he founded to promote the concept of microcredit, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their efforts to further economic and social development at the grassroots level in Bangladesh.
By establishing Grameen Bank in 1983, Yunus sought to realize his vision of self-support for the poor by offering small loans to people who would otherwise not have access to credit.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: