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2006 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Becomes Honorary Professor of Pekin University (with Picture)
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2007-9-17
2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mohammad Yunus from Bangladesh visited Pekin University this afternoon, becoming an honorary professor of the university, and delivered an academic lecture on the issue of "micro-credit and anti-poverty".
President Xu Zhihong of Pekin University congratulated Yunus on getting Nobel Prize 9 days ago, and delivered to him a letter of appointment as the "Honorary Professor of Pekin University". Xu believed that the Prize conferred to Yunus expressed the recognition and support from the whole world to the anti-poverty cause, and his ideas and achievements will have great impact on the anti-poverty cause of China.
Yunus said he has left school for many years, and it is warm experience to be called a "professor" again today. In his speech he sincerely introduced the experience of Bangladesh Rural Bank to use micro-credit in the anti-poverty cause.
This Bangladesh elite, a doctor of economics in the United States, once the head of the Economic Department, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh, challenged the traditional financial system and inefficient bureaucracy of Bangladesh with perseverance. In thirty years beginning from lending 27 US dollars to 42 destitute women farmers, he developed an enormous rural banking network comprised of near four million borrowers (96% of them are women) and 12,546 employees. His bank has 1,277 branches covering 46,620 villages, the repayment rate as high as 98.89%; this reality proves that "the poor people value credit more than the rich."
Yunus believes that each person on the earth is possible and entitled to have a descent life, and that by no means credit has nothing to do with the poor people by nature. The poor people don't lack the courage and determination to get out of poverty. The first difficulty they face is that they can not borrow from formal financial institutions like others do, so that they lack the most fundamental physical conditions to get rid of poverty, while micro-credit is such an innovative system that breaks the rigidity of the traditional credit market. Based on cash flow, it provides a way to the society especially the poor people to change the configuration of primary elements.
The financial concepts of Professor Yunus and the development model of Bangladesh Rural Bank have been successfully copied to many developing countries including China, playing an important role in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
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Organizer:
Beijing Municipal Association for Science & Technology
Undertaker: Beijing Science & Technology
Consulting Center,
Information Center of Beijing Municipal Association for
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