Nobel Peace laureate and micro-credit pioneer Muhammad Yunus vowed to make poverty history as he unveiled new plans to transform the fortunes of Bangladesh's poor.
"I think it's quite possible to eradicate poverty from this world. I think we can halve the poverty level in Bangladesh by 2015. And in the next 15 years we can rid this land of it," Yunus said at the weekend after he was named the country's first ever Nobel winner.
Yunus and his Grameen Bank, which offers tiny loans to very poor borrowers to help them become self-employed, were jointly awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
The bank, which targets women because it believes they are better than men at running family finances, has given small loans to more than 6.6 million people since its inception in 1976.
"You change the environment, and we will lift thousands and millions of people out of poverty," he said.
"They don't need any grant to change their life. People have this power in them. You remove the lid of the hidden power and poor people will automatically change their lives," Yunus, known as the "Banker to the Poor," added.
Yunus has unveiled a string of new initiatives -- including health insurance for the poor, as well as information technology, solar energy and organic fertilizer projects.
Yesterday, the former economics professor flew to the southern port city of Chittagong to pay tribute to the women of nearby Jobra village where he started his pioneering scheme.
"I've come here to say thanks to the people of Chittagong, especially the women of Jobra village, who showed that micro-credit could indeed eradicate poverty," Yunus said at a reception in Chittagong city.
Yunus also made an impassioned appeal to the country's politicians to reach a consensus on election reforms in a bid to pave the way for free and fair general polls in January.
"The whole world is looking at us after the Nobel prize. It's now perfect time for the two major parties to reach a consensus so that we have a smooth election," he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema