Impact Investing for TrusteesImpact Investing for Trustees

In 1976, Muhammad Yunus, then an economics professor at a university in Chittagong, Bangladesh, was spending time in the small village of Jobra, trying to find ways to alleviate the deep poverty endemic to that area. He discovered that one of the contributing reasons for that poverty was usurious lending to local craftpersons struggling day-to-day to make ends meet. Yunus heard troubling stories of borrowers suffering from ultra-high interest rates and getting trapped in a cycle of debt from which escape was virtually inconceivable. Yunus and his associate calculated the total combined debt outstanding among 42 borrowers in the village as the equivalent of $27. This amount, when compared to the billion dollar sums he considered as an eco...