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NOBEL Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus was a resource
speaker at the Government Leaders Forum, April 18-19, 2007, at
Beijing. I was there. Here are some of his thoughts:
On technology
Technology plays a central role,
very strategic role. No matter what you do, in which form you do,
there’s a technology to boost it up, make it powerful. Even just
look at the microfinance itself; if you bring technology, how
powerful it gets, if you take the cell phone and can bring financial
services to the people right away.
And information technology, which
will change the whole world, I mean, getting to the bottom level,
the poorest level, and bring the technology in the hands of the
poorer people will create a completely different kind of world.
We are not putting our mind into
that level yet. We are so mesmerized by the designs and things for
people at the top. Those are all the designs that you have shown.
These are all addressed to those same people, repeatedly, improving
one step, more steps, and a few more steps, but nothing yet to this
beggar woman who sits in the street.
What information technology can
take her out of that begging and be a self-earning system? How young
people looking for a job can change his or her life with information
technology, without being subservient to somebody else? Like if I
could create a company which can not only find my job, and I create
more jobs with information technology, if I can do that, the very
orientation, job orientation itself is a wrong orientation.
Why young people come out of
schools to look for jobs? Why can’t they say I will never seek any
job from anybody, I will create jobs. That’s where the creativity
part comes in, and technology helps that.
So, I would put this as central.
And you said about the renewable
energy and other things, other kinds of technologies, all kinds of
technology, but again the core technology I still see to change the
world is information technology, a manifestation of it, not just one
manifestation, which you have been talking about, there are
thousands of manifestations of how you do that.
On the world being flat
Six percent of the world income
goes to the 60 percent of the world’s population. That’s not a
flat world. So, for those 60 percent with 6-percent income, the
whole thing that we are talking about of the world doesn’t exist.
So not only they are deprived, the people who are enjoying the 94
percent of the income, they’re also deprived, because the
creativity of these people are not put on the table. You don’t
know how much powerful those creativities were, which were
rejected, undiscovered, unexplored, the great gift that each
individual has in them, never that gift never unwrapped, we didn’t
see what it is. So, that’s the shame. That’s where the flatness
disappears.
On health and poverty
I see health as a real challenge
around the world, along with the poverty, because being poor is also
synonymous with being in poor health. It’s the same story, so they
go together. So, if you are addressing poverty, you are impacting on
health; if you’re addressing health, you’re impacting on
poverty. So you can look at it in a simultaneous way.
And we basically left the whole
health issue on the shoulder of the government. That’s what
generally speaking happens. And it’s not doing very well, it’s
not very successful, and with the varieties of experience mostly
it’s people at the bottom not being reached, despite the good
intention of the governments and international programs.
How do we do that? How do we get
to that? And that’s where I was coming up with the idea of
creating another kind of business, social business. Health can be an
exciting social business, a business to address the health issues.
And in our case we are creating two hospitals right now, eye care
hospitals as a social business.
Cataracts are a big problem in
Bangladesh; like many other diseases, cataracts are a problem. So,
we are exclusively addressing the cataract patients, cataract
operations. Everybody will get the service. Those who are able to
pay, they pay full market price. And those who cannot afford it, we
have discounted price. Even somebody who is absolutely beggar at the
lowest level, she gets a treatment, too, but for a penny or
something, but everybody gets the treatment.
Hospital as a whole covers all
its costs. That’s a social business. Nobody is trying to make
money out of this.
So, we can create a lot of those
things, because it becomes institutionalized. Most of the NGOs doing
like in Bangladesh, NGOs have been very effective, BRAC and other
organizations in addressing this. But you need to keep on pumping
money to keep it moving. It improves the health condition, but
institutionalization and self-sufficiency is a very important issue
in that. Bangladesh is a case where mortality, child mortality has
declined.
As a result, one of the reasons,
the fertility rate has gone down very dramatically. It used to be
6.4 some 20 years back; today, it’s 3.0 fertility rate, in 20
years. So, how each one is connected to the other?
So, this is what—and Bangladesh
is doing very well related to India, related to Pakistan, related to
Sri Lanka, Bangladesh is doing very well because it’s doing very
well in poverty reduction. Poverty is reducing in Bangladesh in a
very systematic way, very sustained way.
So, we see the interlinks, so we
need to think in a way that we can do it in a business way, in a
very technology oriented way. More and more of the technology, more
and more business ideas can change the situation dramatically.
Bangladesh and global warming
Bangladesh is a country which is
at the level of most of the sea level, very little high ground in
Bangladesh. If the sea level rises with the global warming, climate
change, millions of people in Bangladesh will be affected, because
part of Bangladesh will go under water. And the remaining part,
which will not go under water, their agriculture, their whole likelihoods
will be threatened. So, with 145 million people in this tiny little
piece of land, with the global warming shaking it up, it will be a
terrible disaster of no going back. It’s not a flood that comes
and disappears; it’s something kind of one way traffic.
On lifestyle change
The whole lifestyle has to
change. This is not a sustainable lifestyle that we are promoting in
rich countries. So, we have to address that issue very quickly, what
kind of lifestyle it is, because today this is seen as the
lifestyle, so everybody else is emulating, like China is coming that
direction, India is coming that direction, Bangladesh is moving in
that direction. Unless those things are changed, we said this is not
sustainable, we have to make a drastic turnaround, be careful about
what we do. This is not going to disappear very easily, even if you
put the brakes today. Still the whole momentum of it will take us a
long time. So, we need to do very, very serious intention into it
and take action on that.
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