Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah received the Nobel Laureate at his Palace in Riyadh on March 20, 2010. Yunus was invited by Prince Miteb bin Abdullah to be the keynote speaker at the National Heritage and Culture Festival in Janadriya. Two Saudi channels televised his hourlong speech live.

“As a Bangladeshi, I’m proud that we have given something to the world ... our work has now been recognized by the whole world,” said Yunus, who is one of those leaders who managed to translate visions into practical action for the benefit of millions of people.

He said the bank’s work in creating opportunities for large numbers of people to get out of poverty created the conditions for sustainable peace.

Yunus set up the bank in 1976 with just $27 from his own pocket. Now, the bank has more than eight million borrowers, 97 percent of them women.

Yunus has established a Yunus Center, which is dedicated to work toward creating a poverty free world. The ultimate goal of the center is to create poverty museums, after bringing an end to poverty in each area, village, city, province and country, especially by engaging the local youth.

In a roundtable with Al-Eqtisadiah last week, Yunus discussed social business as a concept that could rid the world of poverty.

“I’ve started in a small way in Bangladesh, but if it is practiced around the world it could change the way the people do business both with selfishness and selflessness -- the attributes that are common to human beings,” said Yunus, who has also inspired Grameen America, a microfinance institution in the US. Headquartered in New York, it begins to expand nationally to build on its success of the other two branches in Queens, and Brooklyn, New York. Preparations are under way to open a fourth branch, in San Francisco, in August this year.

“We urgently need to address the issues of unemployment and welfare dependence properly through micro-credit,” said Yunus, who dealt at length on the concept of social business and cleared the doubts. He said he had a meeting with the rector of King Saud University in Riyadh and he had shown his interest in establishing a chair for social business at the university. “We don’t need to think alone, but put our thoughts into action,” he added.

He said he was not looking for the villagers who were the first to step forward to ask for a micro-loan. He was looking for those who were the last to come forward and who trusted their abilities the least. To those villagers, Yunus and his staff would say, “Yes, you can.”

More than three decades later over eight million members of Grameen Bank (a total of 40 million when you count their family members) are saying “yes we can” to the whole world. Since its inception, Grameen Bank has lent more than $8 billion to the poor in Bangladesh. “My main objective is to free the poor from the clutches of loan sharks and there cannot be a better way to do it than through the concept of social business,” Yunus said.

The bank has given most of its loans to women, because they are more serious than men in running a social business, with their focus mainly on children and family. Men are casual and so not so serious in any social business. The concept of social business has become popular because of several reasons. A social business enterprise is not a charity organization. It is a commercial entity, but all of its shareholders earn equivalent to what they invest in it. This is not a profit-making business, but something that one can run without selfish interests but with full satisfaction. “You open a food center with small investments and that offers jobs for five people. You replicate such centers and thus provide jobs for more people. This way you tackle the problem of unemployment,” he said.

Yunus said the concept of social business could also operate in Saudi Arabia. “All you need to do is to identify and list the problems facing the people in your area. You need not solve all the problems of all the people. This is not possible. Even if you take up one problem and address it that will help in establishing a social business company create jobs for some people, and give you the satisfaction that you have been able to do something. After all, you need to leave your signature by doing some good deeds in your brief life.”

Today, Bangladesh has been completely transformed. Those who visited the country 25 years ago and who would go there now will find a world of difference. Women, who never handled money and were shy of doing business, are now in the forefront. That is how 97 percent of the bank’s borrowers are women, and they are all engaged in work.

What determines the success of a woman entrepreneur is the graph of her borrowings. If she started a social business with $6 initially and now borrows up to $16,000, then that spells her success as a social businesswoman, he said.

About the collateral for such small loans, Yunus said: “Yes, collaterals for such small borrowings can be in the form of their produce like milk, baskets, or whatever.”

When asked about the enemies of the social business concept, Yunus said: “There are no permanent enemies. Those who may be enemies now may turn friends later.” He gave the example of an imam in Bangladesh who termed my social business concept as unIslamic as it encouraged women to become businesswomen. “The same imam, after he was convinced of the role of businesswomen in ridding poverty and freeing their families from moneylenders, came back to me one day and gave his full approval to the concept of social business and women’s involvement in it.”