Professor Yunus is the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which helps alleviate poverty, through microfinancing, and lending to the country’s poor without the need for collateral, which led to him being awarded the Nobel Peace in 2006.
Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus signed a Memorandum of Understanding at Lincoln on Monday, 10 April, to operate the social business centre at the University. It is the first Yunus Social Business Centre in New Zealand.A social business is set up to solve a specific problem to the benefit of poor or disadvantaged members of society. Unlike a charity, they generate profit and aim to be financially self-sustaining. The objectives of the Yunus Social Business Centre are to; build awareness of social business, and undertake training and education, provide mentoring, and support research on social business.
Centres have been established at other universities around the
world, including La Trobe University, Australia, and King’s College,
London.
Lincoln University Professor in Accounting and Finance,
Christopher Gan said the centre will attract postgraduate students, and
Professor Yunus also had an extensive network throughout the world
which could help to fund research.
The opportunity to have the centre at Lincoln arose because the
University already has a reputation nationally, and internationally, in
the field of economic development through the Lincoln University Centre
for International Development (LUCID), and the work of staff overseas,
Professor Gan said.
While Professor Yunus was in Christchurch he also gave a talk at the Charles Luney Auditorium. Organised by SingularityU and a raft of local organisations, and before an intimate Christchurch audience, the Nobel Peace Prize winner shared his vision for a socially conscious world, sharing his wisdom crafted over four decades of providing micro loans and other social services to poverty-stricken villagers in his home country.
When asked what the biggest problem the world currently faced was,
Yunus said the "ticking time bomb" of wealth concentration would lead to
"social upheaval and political outbursts".
"That is not a sustainable thing," he said.
"The solution is to undue the system that we built that pushes all the wealth to the top. You have to create a reverse process and create new financial institutions because they are the engine which does the job.
This system is not working, this system is heading for a disaster, so before we hit the disaster, we have to get up and turn back."