Muhammad Yunus

The founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus is the first Bangladeshi to win the Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. Along with Saskia Bruysten, Sophie Eisenmann and Hans Reitz, he co-founded the Yunus Social Business – Global Initiatives, which empower social businesses to address social issues over the world. A believer in humane capitalism, Yunus was rated in the second position in Foreign Policy's list of Top 100 Global Thinkers and was named by Fortune Magazine as one of the 12 greatest entrepreneurs of the current era. He is also one of the only seven people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

"In my experience, poor people are the world's greatest entrepreneurs. Every day, they must innovate in order to survive. They remain poor because they do not have the opportunities to turn their creativity into sustainable income.

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

To overcome poverty and the flaws of the economic crisis in our society, we need to envision our social life. We have to free our mind, imagine what has never happened before and write social fiction. We need to imagine things to make them happen. If you don't imagine, it will never happen."