Nobel Laureate Professor Dr Muhammad Yunus received the Notre Dame Award for International Development and Solidarity from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies recently.
The award recognises substantial contributions to human development through research, practice, public service and philanthropy. Rev John I Jenkins, Notre Dame’s President, joined Rev Robert Dowd, Director of Kellogg’s Ford Programme in Human Development Studies and Solidarity, to present the award.
After receiving the award, Yunus delivered spring semester keynote speech at the Notre Dame Forum of the prestigious US University of Notre Dame in Indiana, United States. Speaking to an audience of about 650 in the Dahnke Ballroom of the Duncan Student Centre at the university, Professor Yunus explained why he has devoted his life’s work to social business.
In conversation with Raymond C Offenheiser, Director of the Notre Dame Initiative for Global Development in the Keough School of Global Affairs, Yunus said he began by lending money “out of my own pocket,” and then eventually created a bank to make small loans available to the poor, and mainly to women. Today Grameen Bank has some 2,600 branches and nine million borrowers in 97 per cent of women, in all the villages of Bangladesh. Grameen model has been copied in almost all the countries of the world, and Grameen America operates in 11 US cities with over hundred thousand borrowers, all women.
“Professor Yunus is teaching us that there is a new way of doing business,” Father Jenkins said. Father Dowd added that Yunus’ work proves that “economic development need not come at the expense of human future.”
Titled “Going Global,” this year’s Notre Dame Forum has explored the challenges and opportunities of globalisation. Since its establishment in 2005, the Notre Dame Forum has featured major talks by leading authorities on complex issues, including the role of the presidential debates in our political process, immigration, sustainability, global health, the global marketplace, education, women in leadership.