The Nobel winner who wanted to make poverty a museum piece

Back in 1999 I interviewed the Nobel peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus while in Bangladesh to report on development issues. I left with a lasting impression of a humble, compassionate man with a quiet confidence in the ability of himself, his Grameen Bank colleagues and society as a whole to change the status quo in real and practical ways. These qualities are I suspect often found in people who have directly challenged unacceptable aspects of humanity. For Nelson Mandela it was apartheid, for Mahatma Gandhi it was self-rule, for Prof Yunus it is poverty.

He told me that he had a dream of setting up a museum of poverty; a building where the children of the future would go and marvel at the phenomenon of poverty. They would ask questions which couldn't be answered: "There was great wealth and prosperity and everyone was splurging, so why were others poor and dying?"

To see his ideas in action, I visited a group of women in rural Bangladesh who had taken out Grameen Bank loans. At their weekly meeting, women who had set up small businesses carried their account books and repayments in one hand, their children in the other. (As in the west, women's economic liberation hasn't necessarily run parallel with men's domestic emancipation).

Two women invited me back to their homes. Laily, then 32, showed me her two one-room tin huts, complete with electricity and raised cots. Ten years earlier, before she had taken out a Grameen Bank loan to set up a grocery store, she slept on a mud floor in a straw hut and lived, with her family, on one meal of hot rice in the evening, with cold leftovers the following day. She had a weekly income of 100 taka (then the equivalent of about £1.30). When I visited, that income had risen to 500 taka and the family ate three hot meals a day with chicken, mutton and fish accompanying the rice.

At Hasina's home, I was given a demonstration of the treadle sewing machine she had bought with her loan to make and sell clothing, and she told me of the other machines she was saving up to purchase and expand her business. These women were proud and confident and I left feeling encouraged that microcredit was a good thing.

But one big question lingered about the scheme. Was the encouragement of capitalism, on however small a scale, only serving to entrench a system which many blame for poverty in the first place? Prof Yunus recognised that the bank could well be accused of just churning out more "greedy capitalists". But the economics expert said there was no reason why this had to happen, and cited the bank as an example of socially responsible business.

"A person with a social conscience can run an enterprise with as much dedication and drive as a greedy person - he is just running it to achieve social goals not to fill his pockets," he said.

"And if you put the greedy person against the socially committed person in competition, the greedy guy will fall because he has to make more money to make a profit, where the other guy just has to cover costs."

So what was his ideal world?

"There will always be some poor because everyone has ups and downs, but everyone will be keen to help because poverty will be a novelty."