Prof. Mohammad Yunus to speak on ‘Managing Lives in the New Normal’

Friday, 23 April 2021 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Prof. Muhammad Yunus, Winner of Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and founder of Grameen Bank, Bangladesh – Pic by Nasir Ali Mamun

The widely popular Pos Poss Global Talk will raise its bar by several notches when Prof. Mohammad Yunus, founder of the change-making Grameen Bank, Bangladesh and winner of Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, addresses its audience

spread across the world on 23 April.

Pos Poss Global Talk Series, a flagship program of Mission Better Tomorrow (MBT), is an attempt to spread Positivity (Pos) and explore Possibilities (Poss) which began during the first lockdown. More than a hundred eminent personalities from different walks of life have addressed the series, which is held on Fridays at 07:00 pm IST.

MBT is a collective of likeminded professionals inspired by the thought leadership of P. Vijayan IPS, Inspector General of Police and has been engaging society in various ways to empower the less privileged, with a focus on health and education.

The immense popularity of the Pos-Poss Friday Talk Series, which has an average viewership of nearly 3 lakh every week, prompted MBT leadership to think of a Global Series.

This is the fifth episode of the Pos Poss Global Talk Series, the first four speakers being Kailash Satyarthi, Nobel Peace Laureate; Dr. Shashi Tharoor, renowned author and former diplomat; Dr. Yasmin Ali Haque, UNICEF representative to India and Dr. Praveen Kumar RS, IPS, who is spearheading change among marginalised communities in Telegana as the Secretary of Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TSWREIS) and Telangana Tribal Welfare Residential Educational Institutional Society (TTWREIS).

Prof. Yunus and his Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2006 for their work to “create economic and social development from below”. After completing his studies in Bangladesh and the USA, Prof. Yunus was working as Professor of Economics at the University of Chittagong when the great famine hit Bangladesh in 1974. He was inspired to translate the lessons of economics into reality and improve the life of people around him. He started off with long-term loans to people who wanted to start small enterprises. This was scaled up to a larger demographic level through the Grameen Bank. Since its inception in 1983, the Grameen Bank and its concept of micro-credit has been inspiring similar ventures in hundreds of other countries.

By the time the Nobel Prize was conferred in 2006, the Grameen Bank had granted loans to more than seven million borrowers – the average loan amount being 100 dollars and 97% of borrowers being women in 73,000 villages in Bangladesh. Similarly, the Grameen Bank brought 85,000 beggars in Bangladesh into their loan scheme to launch small enterprises and could help more than 5,000 of them stop begging, Prof. Yunus shared in his Nobel address in 2006.

The pandemic has brought drastic changes to the social structure, and all support systems that were in place till now have become redundant. New normals demand new solutions. Prof. Yunus will address the Pos Poss audience on the topic ‘Managing Lives in the New Normal: No Going Back’ on Friday, 23 April, at 7 p.m. IST through Zoom platform. The Zoom meeting id is 889 1747 5443 and the passcode is 123123.

The talk will be streamed live on all social media channels of MBT: http://facebook.com/mbtunited, http://instagram.com/mbtunited and http://youtube.com/mbtunited.