They distribute annually 800 million of loans to 6

The Nobel Prize in the 2006 peace... is a banker. Customary of the opposite, the Oslo Committee has once again surprised Friday by awarding the most prestigious of the awards jointly to the inventor of microcredit, Muhammad Yunus, sixty-six years, and the Grameen Bank, which he is the founding patron in Bangladesh. The legatees of Alfred Nobel claim however logic to have distinguished the "banker of the poor" among 191 candidates: "A lasting peace cannot be obtained without a significant proportion of the population find ways out of poverty." (...) "Microcredit is one of these ways," said Ole Danbolt Mjoes, the Chairman of the Committee. After tense bridges to the human rights achievement Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi in 2003 and the defence of the environment with green Kenyan Wangari Maathai in 2004, the Nobel and opened their horizon to the economy and development, that they bind explicitly to democracy and human rights.

Son of jeweller of Chittagong, port and second largest city of Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus has benefited from his studies of Economics in the United States and its field experience in one of the poorest countries in the world to the point, thirty years ago, a model of credit to the poor copied into the developed economies. A simple system: the Grameen Bank (of the bengali "grameen" "village") is without any guarantee of low amounts of money ($ 130 on average); in return, her practice a relatively high interest rates (at least 20), is defiant on repayment deadlines and requires a combination of collectively responsible borrowers. This access to credit than there would have never wanted to see enter a traditional bank was snowball. In Bangladesh, branches of the Grameen 2,000 become part of the landscape of the big towns, alongside the mosque and Bazaar. They distribute annually $ 800 million of loans to 6.5 million borrowers (including 97 of women), who also become co-owners of the Bank. To date, $ 5.7 billion was mobilized for the Bangladeshi poor since the birth of an institution so duplicated all over the planet that the beneficiaries of microcredit are in hundreds of millions of people.

A "lender of hope."

Muhammad Yunus sleeps for a long time the largest in the world. His sparkling eye, his eternal smile and his traditional Bangladeshi dress are recognized in many international conferences to which he is regularly invited. The man is simple. In his fiefdom of Mirpur, a neighbourhood green of the populous Dhaka, he enjoys sharing bananas and mangoes "of the products of the soil of my country' with its visitors. The "banker of the poor" defines itself as "lender of hope." Those struggling often survival on a daily basis, it actually opens a horizon in a week, a month, or even a year. A revolution. Defender, as Gandhi, the "small is beautifull", it is no less a contractor which is great. Grameen Phone (first mobile operator in Bangladesh), Grameen Telecom, Grameen Communications, Grameen Software, Grameen Cybernet, Grameen Jobs... are adaptations of an empire which today employs nearly 19,000 people. Zinedine Zidane will travel the month next to Bangladesh for the first plant for the manufacture of yoghurt of Grameen Danone Foods, a joint venture with the French group.

The Nobel, today, and the man at the feet of gold, tomorrow: a double blow of projector unexpected on a country often forgotten and undermined by a picture of condemned of the Earth, but still worked a few years his great Indian neighbor, by compelling emerging economic dynamism.