Building Social Business

BULDING SOCIAL BUSINESS Social business is a non-loss and non-dividend company dedicated entirely to achieve a social goal. Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi banker. Economist, founder of Grameen bank and Nobel Peace Prize recipient explains in his book what social business is and how it can help the development of our communities. Yunus, previously was a professor of economics where he developed the idea and concepts of micro-credit and micro-finance. In the early seventies, Bangladesh was in a terrible state; the aftermath of the war of liberation (which started on 26 March 1971 and ended 16 December 1971) with the destruction caused by the Pakistani army combined with floods, droughts, and monsoons to create a desperate situation for millions of people. During this war, Bangladesh suffered a vast amount of famine and this country did not improve; at this time Yunus was teaching at Chittagong university where he was teaching economics but there wasn't a great enthusiasm because everyone in the city was dieing of hunger and noticed that as an academic he wasn't solving global problems. In trying to discover what he could do to help; he learned many things about the poor people who lived in Jobra, a village in Bangladesh; he came face to face with the struggle of the poor people to find the tiniest amounts of money needed to support their efforts to eke out a living. He met a woman who buys bamboo to craft stools; this woman had borrowed just 5 taka (the equivalent of around 7 Cents in U.S currency) from a moneylender and trader. The interest rate on such loans was very high, she would have to also sell all her products to the moneylender at a price she would determine. Realizing that there must be something terribly wrong with the economics he was teaching, Yunus took matters into his hands, he made a list of the people who had borrowed from the moneylenders; to free these borrowers, he reached into his own pocket and gave them the money to repay their loans. The