Muhammad Yunus

Bangladeshi economist and founder of the Grameen Bank, cited across Kyle’s corpus as the archetype of micro-lending and social enterprise. In Working Toward Zion, Yunus’s village-banking model is held up — alongside Mondragon and Value Added Ventures — as a contemporary instance of an economic framework genuinely distinct from both capitalism and socialism. The book recounts how Yunus, returning to Bangladesh after a U.S. Ph.D., found conventional economic theory inconsistent with the Third World’s “painful struggle for survival” and responded by offering micro-loans to the poor; the Grameen model used small peer-liability lending groups, a set of 16 principles emphasizing frugality and savings, and achieved a 98% repayment record, inspiring imitators like the Lakota Fund and Chicago’s Full Circle Fund.

In MBA Degrees, Yunus’s Grameen Bank (together with Wendy Kopp’s Teach for America) is named as the inspiration for a counter-current of MBAs using the degree as a springboard into the social sector — the “Social MBA” thread.

Context: Muhammad Yunus (b. 1940) is a Bangladeshi economist who founded the Grameen Bank in 1983 to provide microcredit to the rural poor; he and the bank shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering microfinance and “economic and social development from below.”

Where this appears

• Working Toward Zion — Grameen village banking cited as a contemporary instance of a non-capitalist/non-socialist economic framework
• MBA Degrees — named (with Wendy Kopp) as inspiration for the “Social MBA” springboard into the social sector