Social Entrepreneurship: An Evidence-Based Approach to Creating Social Value

chapter THREE

Discovering and Creating Social Entrepreneurial Opportunities

Founded by Muhammad Yunus, the Grameen Bank (“Bank of the Villages” in the Bengali language) is a microfinance organization and community development bank started in Bangladesh that makes small loans to the impoverished without requiring collateral. The story of the Grameen Bank began in 1974, three years after the independence of Bangladesh as a country, when Yunus, then a professor of economics at the University of Chittagone, witnessed widespread famine in the rural northern region of his country. Yunus recalls, “[Refugees] started showing up at the train stations and bus terminals—people withered to skeletons . . . They were everywhere. Soon the first corpses were ...