2006 Nobel Peace Prize

It was heartening to watch on the news that Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank jointly won this year's Nobel Peace Prize - what a deserving winner!

I remember watching a documentary of Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank previously and was very encouraged that in this day and age of financial consultants telling us how to amass more wealth for ourselves, this man saw it fit to devise a way to help others out of poverty. If not for him, the many women and families he helped won't have the hope they now have.

While watching the news about the Nobel Peace Prize, one man was asked how could he let his wife take charge of their business (they have a plot of land and his wife engaged 2 workers to till the land). He said something to the effect the wife does it well and he feels it best to leave her to do it. What a great answer! To me, it wasn't about the empowerment of a woman but in a marriage, recognising that one partner had a certain strength in a specific area and letting him or in this case, her, take charge of that. I know it's significant in Bangladesh cos the men tend to be seen as the head of the house and take charge, rather than the women (although they tend to be the ones that work really hard for their families).

Muhammad Yunus was also interviewed and he said the commercial banks charge high interest at rates the poor cannot repay - so true! These are a few comments taken from the Nobel Peace Prize website on what Yunus said straight after he was notified about his win.

"The one message that we are trying to promote all the time, that poverty in the world is an artificial creation. It doesn't belong to human civilization, and we can change that, we can make people come out of poverty and have the real state of affairs. So the only thing we have to do is to redesign our institutions and policies, and there will be no people who will be suffering from poverty. So I would hope that this award will make this message heard many times, and in a kind of forceful way, so that people start believing that we can create a poverty-free world. That's what I would like to do.

"Oh yes, very much, we see the demonstration of it every day. People come out of poverty every day. So it's right in front of us what happens and it can be done globally, it can be done more forcefully, we can organize more things to go with it, so this is something not theoretical issue, it's a very real issue. People can change their own lives, provided they have the right kind of institutional support. They're not asking for charity, charity is no solution to poverty. Poverty is the creation of opportunities like everybody else has, not the poor people, so bring them to the poor people, so that they can change their lives. That's all we are doing. We didn't do anything special; lend money to the people so – but they never lent it to the poor people – all we did was we lent it to the poor people, and that makes the trick. That makes the change."