A Utah surgeon figures that in the lifetime of Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist will have impacted the lives of hundreds of millions of poor people around the world.
"I've known for a long time this guy deserved to win a Nobel prize," says Dr. Scott Leckman, who works at St. Mark's Hospital and lives in Murray.
The Nobel committee announced Friday that Yunus and the Grameen Bank, which he established in the 1980s, won the award for their use of "microcredit" — small loans intended to help end poverty.
Professors at Brigham Young University also say their friend and colleague is a worthy recipient of the $1.4 million prize for his work to end poverty in his homeland.
"Here's a humble, sweet individual from a very poor country, building peace around the world in a slow, quiet, behind-the-scenes way," said Warner Woodworth, a BYU professor of social entrepreneurship who has known and worked with Yunus for years. "He's giving (the poor) hope in their own futures."
Leckman first visited Bangladesh in 1992 to see Yunus and learn more about the Grameen Bank and the economist's "counter-intuitive" concept in the 1970s of loaning small amounts of money to the poor without any collateral. Yunus' assumption that these poor people would work hard to pay him back while developing their own successful trades turned out to be accurate.
"I knew very early on that this guy is changing the world," Leckman said.
To date the Grameen Bank says it has loaned $5.72 billion — usually in increments of about $200 — to more than six million Bangladeshis, most of them female, the Associated Press reported. The concept of microcredit financing has benefited an estimated 17 million people worldwide.
"He has shown that giving small loans is an important tool toward ending poverty," Leckman said of Yunus. "He believes that every human being has a right to live a dignified life."
At the time of Leckman's first visit to Bangladesh, which has a population 141 million, he had already helped start a Salt Lake chapter of RESULTS, a Washington-based group that lobbies lawmakers to create policy toward ending poverty and hunger. Leckman traveled to see Yunus again in 1995, 1998 and 2001.
In the meantime, thousands of "microenterprise" programs popped up around the world, including the Utah Microenterprise Loan Fund, which, with loans of between $1,000 and $25,000, has helped launch or expand 448 small businesses in this state.
For his part, Woodworth first met Yunus at a conference in the late '90s, which he attended with a group of BYU students studying economic development in Third World countries.
Woodworth later arranged for Yunus to visit BYU. He has returned multiple times to campus and other areas in Utah to raise money and awareness about microcredit. In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from BYU.
For BYU students studying social entrepreneurship, Yunus is a perfect example, said Todd Manwaring, BYU professor and managing director of the BYU Center for Economic Self Reliance.
"I think there are a lot of students at BYU who want to know what to do," Manwaring said. "Muhammad Yunus is very helpful (because) here's a real-life method; here's something that someone's doing that's changing the lives of millions of people."
The AP said Yunus plans to use his share of the $1.4 million in prize money to set up an eye hospital for the poor in Bangladesh and to create "Social Business Enterprise," a company that will sell low-cost, high-nutrition food to the poor for a "nominal" price.
For Leckman, the success of microcredit all comes back to Yunus. When asked why someone like Yunus hadn't come along before, Leckman hesitates.
"That's a good question," he said. "I think most people are hopeless about (poverty) because they view it as something intractable — they just aren't aware there are things that can be done."
Anyone interested in learning more about the Salt Lake chapter of RESULTS is asked to call Leckman at 801-268-4924.