Reuters: Africa's banking laws shut out the poor: Yunus
NAIROBI (Reuters) – Lack of microcredit laws in many African countries is denying millions of the continent's poor access to loans, a Nobel Prize winner Mohammad Yunus, said on Tuesday.
Yunus, who won a Nobel Prize in 2006 for championing Microcredit, tiny loans to the poor in Bangladesh, is now pioneering an idea he calls "social business" as a way to fight poverty around the world — business not for profit but to solve social problems.
"To create a new kind of bank, which works with the poor people, we need new legislation but in most of the countries in Africa that legislation has not taken place, so we have left microcredit scenario to the NGOs," Yunus told Reuters in an interview.
Nicknamed the "banker to the poor," Yunus started his movement 30 years ago with a $27 loan to women in Chittagong, Bangladesh.
It has mushroomed and delivered millions of tiny loans to poor people who do not have access to mainstream banking.
"People are ready in Africa there is no problem with the people it's a question of institutional and conceptual arrangement and microcredit could be wonderful social business," he said. …
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