Last month I was part of a team that travelled to Washington, D.C. and met with officials from the US administration. I learnt that President Barack Obama is holding an 'entrepreneurship in Muslim communities summit' next March in the US capital about an emerging phenomenon known as social entrepreneurship. A social entrepreneur is, according to Wikipedia, a person who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organise, create, and manage a venture to make social change. I had never heard of this concept prior to that visit, or so I thought. It turns out that the founder of one of the most popular forms of social entrepreneurship is the Nobel Laureate Mohammed Younis who developed the practice of microfinance in 1976.
Microfinance allows low income individuals who were previously outside the traditional banking and finance sectors radar screens, to have access not only to small amounts of funding but also to insurance, transfer and savings. These funds can be as low as a few score dollars and are usually requested by individuals who do not want charity but need funding to start a business and get a head start in life. By the time Mr Younis won the Nobel Prize for peace in 2006, Grameen bank had almost seven million borrowers - 97% of whom were women.
Younis’s work has lifted microfinance in to the limelight the world over. Similar concepts are now used in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But I wondered if such an idea could work in the oil rich Gulf States.
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