Senior fellow David Roodman was quoted in a Huffington Post article on Muhammad Yunus's work to improve the microfinance industry.
From the Article
The Nobel Peace Prize winner who invented microcredit presented his latest idea for combating poverty, "social business," to the State Department on Thursday.
Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who has championed microfinance as a way to alleviate poverty in the developing world through entrepreneurship, told The Huffington Post that he would encourage U.S. policymakers to change the way they administer foreign aid. Instead of giving handouts of food and other aid, Yunus argues that donor nations like the United States should help fund groups based on a model of social business.
Not quite a for-profit company nor a nonprofit philanthropy institution, a social business is a hybrid in which owners recoup their investment but take no more in dividends. The goal is not to get rich but to provide health care, housing, clean water, nutrition for malnourished children, renewable energy and other goods "in a business way." Yunus said the business model is aimed at "creating a new space without closing down the other sides."
While in Washington to speak to a gathering of international development and aid organizations, Yunus met privately with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She has been a longtime champion of his microcredit work and Grameen Bank, which he started in 1983 to make tiny loans to the poor, 97 percent of them women.
While Yunus was recently forced by the Bangladeshi government to resign from Grameen in what is widely viewed as a politically-motivated move, he said he hoped Clinton would step up her support of social business to help empower the powerless.
He suggested Haiti, whose economy remains shattered from the January 2010 earthquake, as the logical place to start.