গ্রামীন ব্যাংক

Muhammad Yunus was inspired during the Bangladesh famine of 1974 to make a small loan of US$27 to a group of 42 families as start-up money so that they could make items for sale, without the burdens of high interest under predatory lending.[7]Yunus believed that making such loans available to a larger population could stimulate businesses and reduce the widespread rural poverty in Bangladesh. Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, the bank's founder Yunus developed the principles of the Grameen Bank from his research and experience. Grameen Bank is Bengali for "Rural" or "Village" Bank.[8] He began to expand microcredit as a research project together with the Rural Economics Project at Bangladesh's University of Chittagong to test his method for providing credit and banking services to the rural poor. In 1976, the village of Jobra and other villages near the University of Chittagong became the first areas eligible for service from Grameen Bank.[9]Proving successful, the Bank project, with support from Bangladesh Bank, was extended in 1979 to the Tangail District (to the north of the capital, Dhaka).[9]The bank's success continued and its services were extended to other districts of Bangladesh. By a Bangladeshi government ordinance on 2 October 1983, the project was authorised and established as an independent bank.[9] Bankers Ron Grzywinski and Mary Houghton of ShoreBank, a community development bank in Chicago, helped Yunus with the official incorporation of the bank under a grant from the Ford Foundation.[10] The bank's repayment rate suffered from the economic disruption following the 1998 flood in Bangladesh, but it recovered in the subsequent years. By the beginning of 2005, the bank had loaned over USD 4.7 billion[11] and by the end of 2008, USD 7.6 billion[12] to the poor. In 2011, the Bangladesh Government forced Yunus to resign from Grameen Bank, saying that at age 72, he was years beyond the legal limit for the position.[13] As of 2017, the Bank had about 2,600 branches and nine million borrowers, with a repayment rate of 99.6%. 97% of the borrowers were women. The Bank has been active in 97% of the villages of Bangladesh.[14][15] Its success has inspired similar projects in more than 40 countries around the world, including a World Bank initiative to finance Grameen-type schemes.[16] Grameen Bank is now expanding into wealthy countries, as well. As of 2017, Grameen America had 19 branches in eleven US cities. Its nearly 100,000 borrowers were all women.[14]