Room for 'social business' in S'pore: Nobel laureate

from The Straits Times

By Cheong Suk-Wai

SINGAPORE is a global business centre with room for 'social business', says Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus.

'Social business is not charity... It's better to teach a man how to fish that to give him fish,' said the Bangladeshi economist and founder of micro-credit, who called on not-for-profit businesses and programmes to generate jobs and other opportunities to help those trapped in poverty.

'The business proposition is for the poor to pay a tiny amount of money for you to take care of their needs,' Professor Muhammad Yanus told The Straits Times here on Friday.

'You can, for example, bring health insurance to the poor, who pay a little bit every year for it. And I know if Singaporean people design it, it will be world-standard quality because you have the highest standards.'

Two or three Singaporeans, he added, could start such businesses just by pooling, say, their year-end bonuses.

In fact, he pointed out, with Singapore's reputation for quality, other countries would soon want to replicate its schemes since they would probably be the 'most efficient' by far.

Doing so, he added wryly, would also make society here 'more balanced and humane'.

Prof Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for lending tiny sums to the destitute so they could go into business, was the keynote speaker at a panel discussion on development in Bangladesh and Singapore at the National University of Singapore (NUS)'s Bukit Timah campus.

It was organised by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS and the Institute of South Asian Studies.

In 1974, the unassuming Bangladeshi economist started a social revolution when he took US$27 (S$39) out of his pocket and lent it to 42 Bangladeshi basket-weavers.

After years of dispensing small loans to the desperate, he set up the not-for-profit Grameen (Bengali for 'rural') Bank in Bangladesh in n 1983 to help even more needy folk, whom he made part-owners of Grameen and who paid it back in weekly instalments.

Today, Grameen is owned by 7.5 million Bangladeshis, most of them women, who previously held no purse strings because their culture entrusts money to men.

With 98 per cent of all borrowers repaying loans totalling more than US$5 billion today, his successful ways with microcredit are now followed in China, Canada, Thailand and India, among others.

His goal is to get Bangladesh's total population of 150 million owning the bank by 2013.

Grameen has also branched into more not-for-profit ventures like Grameen Shakti (to light up most Bangladeshi homes with solar power for people to read at night) and GrameenPhone (giving villagers solar-powered pay phones so they can run businesses).

The bank also gives out 30,000 scholarships a year to poor students now known as 'Grameen Children'.

Which begged the question: how to get materialistic non-Grameen children to help the needy?

Prof Muhammad Yunus smiled and said: 'Children today are born with plenty. And what do you do with your life when you are born with plenty? You want to do something to put your signature on this planet.'

'By having your own business with purpose,' he added, 'you can design things on your own and feel happy about it. This is not something that your Dad or Mum have done.'