Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus pioneered “microcredit,” the innovative banking program that provides impoverished people—mainly women—with small loans to launch businesses and lift their families out of poverty. He is the founder and managing director of Grameen Bank and the author of the bestselling book, Banker to the Poor.
In this clip, he sits down with Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, to describe a new way to use business to tackle social problems from poverty and pollution to inadequate health care and lack of education. At one point, he offers an interesting explanation for why his bank, by design, almost exclusively offers all of its loans to woman. At the end of the discussion, Sachs says, “well, we had prophets and profits tonight!”