This is not charity. This is business: business with a social objective, which is to help people get out of poverty.
They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.
Business money is limitless.
The profit orientation is only one orientation of a person. The same people who are interested in profit-making are also selfless. I am not saying that capitalist theory is wrong. I am saying that it has not been interpreted and practiced fully.
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.
We got rid of colonialism, we got rid of slavery, and we got rid of apartheid everyone thought each one of them was impossible. Let’s take the next impossible, do it with joy and get it finished with and create a world free from poverty. Let us create the world of our choice.
When you get a mobile phone it is almost like having a card to get you out of poverty in a couple of years.
The current financial crisis makes it very clears that the system that we have isn’t really working, and this is the right time for us to undo things and build them in a new way.
We have done some of these in Bangladesh. Whenever I see a problem, I immediately go and create a company. That’s what I did all my life.
I am proposing to create another kind of business, based on “selflessness” that is in all of us. I am calling it social business.
If we are looking for one single action which will enable the poor to overcome their poverty, I would focus on credit.
An individual poor person is an isolated island by himself and herself. IT can end that isolation overnight.
Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business.
I made a list of people who needed just a little bit of money. And when the list was complete, there were 42 names. The total amount of money they needed was $27. I was shocked.
I’m on the faculty. I teach. And it’s not easy for a poor person to enter the campus to track down the professor in the campus in a Bangladesh situation. They all will be stopped at the gate. You have no business in the university!
People need such a small amount of money to deal with their own daily life. Because wherever I went to school they taught me about millions of dollars. I dealt with billions of dollars in national plans and investment plans and so on. Not this tiny money, $27 for 42 people.
What I learned in school, what I learned in the educational part of my life. Trying to acquire a kind of a bird’s eye view. You drive hard and see everything. And that’s called education because now you can see everything.
I’m finding that knocking at their mindsets is hard work. A simple knock will not make it crawl. I was trying to push it. I was trying to find a bird’s eye view where I could find a big solution. So this is what I was trying.
When you say vision you have a track that this is what I would like to say.
It’s very difficult to look at it in a kind of a free manner, what reality is. That was my first struggle, to see it as it is, rather than tainted by my own previous thoughts.
I had only immediate things today, only today, not tomorrow. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Today I can see myself like crystal.