Yunus opens Jobra Museum
Nobel Laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus has set up a museum and archive in Jobra, a village which gave birth to a powerful lending system forty years ago that lifted millions of people out of poverty globally.
The Jobra Museum and Archive was opened on Saturday by the founder of Grameen Bank, which began its journey in 1976 as an experiment in the village located near the Chittagong University.
During his visits to the poorest households in Jobra in 1976, Yunus discovered that very small loans can make a disproportionate difference to a poor person.
Village women who made bamboo furniture had to take usurious loans to buy bamboo, and repay their profits to the lenders as traditional banks did not want to make tiny loans at reasonable interest rates to the poor due to high risk of default.
But Yunus believed that, given the chance, the poor can repay the money. He lent $27 of his money to 42 women in the village from where he made a profit of Tk 0.50 on each loan.
Since then his revolutionary microcredit system has been copied around the world. It earned him and Grameen Bank Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
Interesting feature of the event was the gathering of most of the former staff of the first branch of Grameen Bank as well as Prof HI Latifee who coordinated all the activities of Prof Yunus during early years, Yunus Centre said in a statement yesterday.
Prof Yunus narrated the story how it all began in Jobra with collaboration between the people of the village and an academic from the university.
He recalled the role played by the village youth and the elders in his initiative of creating Nabajug Tebhaga Khamar (New Three Share Farm) in 1974 for producing an irrigated crop in the village, to add a third crop in their crop cycle.
Prof Sekander Khan, former chairman of economics at Chittagong University, and ASM Mohiuddin, acting managing director of Grameen Bank, were also present.
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