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BANGKOK: Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus is establishing the Yunus Centre at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Bangkok which will focus on non-conventional ways to tackle poverty.
In developing countries in Asia, 690 million people live off less than US$1 a day, and many earn their meagre living by subsistence farming. But the global economic crisis and volatile prices of staple foods have made it all the more difficult. Yet there is much that can be done.
Microcredit pioneer, Professor Yunus, who is also the founder of Grameen Foundation, maintains that targeted and sustainable assistance can be a vital key to lifting people out of poverty.
He said: "The whole idea of the Yunus Centre is to bring the ideas and the concepts that I have been promoting and the imagination of creating a new kind of world. The one description of the world I want to see is a world where nobody will be a poor person - because there is no reason why anybody, anywhere in the world, should go through the misery and indignity of being a poor person."
At the Yunus Centre at AIT, scholars will be able to research ways to improve the lives of the poor and apply what they have learnt in those communities.
A precursor to the new centre is a project which aims to train mid-level government officials in development issues. And in Laos, this approach has proved effective.
Prof Yunus said: "This will be a kind of laboratory of experimentations and new ideas and some of them will be excellent ideas which will be applicable for the whole country, some of them for the whole world, you never know. When the seed is developed, you can plant it everywhere."
By championing the use of small loans to the poor, Prof Yunus was instrumental in making microcredit a mainstream practice. Given the challenges facing the poor in this economic climate, it is hoped that centres like the one at AIT will become a place where new ideas to eradicate poverty will take shape.
- CNA/yt
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