Muhammad Yunus

Muhammad Yunus (born 28 June 1940) is a Bangladeshi economist, banker and statesman, born in the village of Bathua near Chittagong. He founded Grameen Bank, which began operation as a full-fledged bank on 1 October 1983, pioneering microcredit for the poor; he and the bank received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below" — Yunus was the first Bangladeshi Nobel laureate. After the July 2024 uprising he headed Bangladesh's interim government as Chief Adviser from 8 August 2024 to 17 February 2026. ^{1 2}

Yunus was born in the village of Bathua, in Hathazari, Chittagong District, Bengal, in British India, the third of nine children. His father, Haji Muhammad Dula Mia Saudagar, was a jeweller — described in English Wikipedia as a Sufi jeweller — and his mother was Sufia Khatun; Arabic Wikipedia records that his mother's habit of never turning away a poor person at her door was among his deepest influences. The family moved to Chittagong city in 1944. He matriculated from Chittagong Collegiate School ranked 16th of 39,000 students in East Pakistan, studied at Chittagong College, and was an active Boy Scout who travelled to Canada for a jamboree in 1955. ^{1 3}

He took his BA in 1960 and MA in 1961 at the University of Dhaka, worked as a research assistant at the Bureau of Economics under Nurul Islam and Rehman Sobhan, and from 1961 lectured in economics at Chittagong College while running a profitable packaging factory on the side. A Fulbright scholarship took him to the United States, where he completed a PhD in economics at Vanderbilt University in 1969 and taught as an assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University from 1969 to 1972. ¹

During Bangladesh's 1971 Liberation War, Yunus founded a citizens' committee and a Bangladesh Information Center in the United States and published the Bangladesh Newsletter from Nashville in support of his country's cause. He returned in 1972, served briefly on the Planning Commission, then resigned to head the Economics Department at Chittagong University. After the 1974 famine he turned to field work against rural poverty: in 1975 he launched the Nabajug Tebhaga Khamar three-share farming cooperative, later adopted by the government as a national programme, and proposed Gram Sarkar, "village government". ¹

In 1976, in the village of Jobra, Yunus lent US$27 of his own money to 42 women bamboo workers, each of whom made a profit of BDT 0.50; in December that year he secured a Janata Bank loan to expand the experiment, and membership reached 28,000 by 1982. On 1 October 1983 the project began operation as a full-fledged bank, Grameen Bank. Arabic Wikipedia dates the bank's founding to 1979, while the English sources and the Nobel Prize page give 1983 for the start of full banking operations, so the museum presents both dates without settling them. ^{1 2 3}

By July 2007 Grameen had issued US$6.38 billion to 7.4 million borrowers through its solidarity-group system, with more than 94% of its loans going to women, and its model had been replicated in some 100 countries. The Grameen family diversified into fisheries and agriculture (from 1989) and into Grameen Telecom, which created Grameenphone; in 2008 Yunus founded the Yunus Centre in Dhaka as a think tank for social business. ^{1 2}

Yunus and Grameen Bank jointly received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize (his share one half), announced on 13 October 2006 — the first Nobel Prize for a Bangladeshi. He received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010, becoming one of only seven people to hold all three honours. He was Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University (2012–2018), served on the board of the UN Foundation (1998–2021), was a founding board member of Grameen America and the Grameen Foundation, and a founding member of The Elders, convened by Nelson Mandela in 2007. ^{2 1}

Yunus had earlier served as an adviser holding three portfolios in the 1996 caretaker government (3 April – 23 June 1996). On 18 February 2007 he founded a political party, Nagorik Shakti ("Citizens' Power"), and abandoned it on 3 May the same year. ¹

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum.

In January 2024 a Dhaka labour court sentenced Yunus to six months in prison in a labour-law case; his supporters describe the case as politically motivated, as Arabic Wikipedia records, and more than 170 global leaders, including Barack Obama and Ban Ki-moon, had signed an open letter in his support. ^{3 1}

During his interim government, human-rights organisations criticised its security record: Ain o Salish Kendra reported 197 people killed in lynchings and mob violence in 2025, and another human-rights organisation counted at least 293 killed in mob violence up to December 2025. The museum records these reports attributed to their sources and takes no position on them. ¹

After the July 2024 uprising and Sheikh Hasina's resignation and departure from the country, President Mohammed Shahabuddin appointed Yunus Chief Adviser of the interim government, and he was sworn in on 8 August 2024. He pledged continued humanitarian aid for the Rohingya and support for the garment industry, and proclaimed the July Declaration on 5 August 2025. His tenure ended on 17 February 2026, when Tarique Rahman took oath as Prime Minister following the BNP-led alliance's landslide victory in the 12th national election. ¹

Yunus's books on microcredit and social business include Banker to the Poor, Creating a World Without Poverty and A World of Three Zeros. The museum does not yet hold records for these works, so they are named here without links. ¹

The Economics Department at Chittagong University was his academic base, and Dhaka — seat of his bank, his centre, and his official residence as Chief Adviser — is recorded as a relation in the record's data. Yunus married Vera Forostenko (1970–1977) and then Afrozi Yunus (1980); he has two daughters, Monica and Deena, and his brother Muhammad Ibrahim is a noted scientist. This museum does not publish family details beyond what is needed to understand his work. As to his own faith, the sources describe his father as a Sufi — a description of the father, not an attestation for the son — and no source consulted names a school for Yunus himself, so the museum records the value as unknown. ^{1 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.