Muhammad Yunus's Visit to UBC

As part of the UBC 100 Years centenary celebration, we invited 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Professor Muhammad Yunus to deliver the first annual Michael Smith memorial Nobel Lecture. Dr. Yunus is such a humble gentleman and his speech was truly inspiring. He talked about the background of creating Grameen Bank -- the idea started with a loan lending a total of $27 to women producing bamboo artwork at an entire village in his home country Bangladesh. Then, how the bank grew bigger and helped more poor people in his country. He made some points I couldn’t agree more. He talked about “the world is a strange place” now: financial institutions only lend big money to people who already have big money. Those who are really in need of money rarely get helped. Also, he mentioned the fact that no one was born to be poor, it’s the system that makes poor people poor. He gave an example of comparing a mother who was helped by his bank with her daughter who was supported by her to become a PhD student. It’s like a giant tree seed being placed at a small flower garden -- it cannot grow tall not because its nature but where its growing environment was restrained. Furthermore, he talked about the story when he went to sit down with the beggars to try to figure out what went wrong with their life and how he made them to become small merchants. Dr. Yunus closed out his lecture by declaring his ultimate goal: creating poverty museums for Bangladesh, for the world -- let poverty become a history! The amazing legacy Professor Muhammad Yunus did was to use his expertise to do little things to help those who were in need of help.