DHAKA, Oct 13: Bangladeshi Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus said on Friday he would donate his share of the 1.4-million-dollar prize money to good causes.
Yunus said he would use his share to fund a project to produce low-cost, nutritious food for the poor, an eye hospital, a drinking water project and a health care scheme.
“I will donate all my money to these enterprises. These will be purely social business enterprises, i.e. not-for-profit organisations,” he said.
“I will use the money to finance our joint venture food company with Danone so that the poor can eat high nutrition food at an affordable price,” he added.
“The company will go into operation very soon,” he told reporters, giving no further details.
The French food giant Danone and Yunus’ Grameen Bank said earlier this year that they would work together to produce food products aimed at providing nutrition to millions of low income people. Danone and Grameen Bank will each have a 50 per cent stake in a one-million-dollar plant to be set up in the northern city of Bogra.
The French company is the world’s biggest producer of fresh dairy products and bottled water with total sales of around 16 billion dollars in 2005. It is the joint world leader in the biscuits market. Half of Danone’s 200 factories and 89,500 employees are located in Asia.
decision welcomed: Bangladeshis hailed their nation’s Nobel Peace Prize winner on Friday, “banker to the poor” Muhammad Yunus who launched his micro-credit system from one of the world’s most poverty-stricken countries.
Hundreds of friends and admirers gathered at his Dhaka residence with flowers and garlands to greet the man who set up Grameen Bank in 1976 to lend to the very poorest in his native Bangladesh.
“Bangladesh is proud of Prof Yunus ... (he) has brought a magnificent honour to himself and his country,” said Shaheedul Haque, a senior government official and writer.
In a country born in 1971 after a war of independence and with much of its history strewn with coups, some hoped the Nobel Peace Prize — the first in any category for a Bangladeshi — would help usher in a less troubled future.
“Yunus has achieved a long cherished and deserved laurel. Let us now wish our country may achieve peace and tranquillity,” said Mahmudur Rahman, a professor of medicine.
News of the award is likely to give the country a much-needed boost and welcome distraction from never-ending strikes and political infighting ahead of elections next year.
The disaster-prone country is one of the world’s most densely populated. Many of its 140 million people struggle to eke out a living — just the sort of client Yunus’s bank aims to help.
“Yunus’s award has brought Bangladesh to a new focus internationally. He has established that poverty and peace cannot go together,” said Kutubuddin Ahmed, a business leader and ex-president of the Dhaka Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Some wondered whether Bangladesh’s image abroad had delayed the award for Yunus.
“Nevertheless, we have made it. Yunus has the Nobel Peace award today. He works for peace through the survival of the poorest,” Dhaka University student Abul Hasanat Shaheen told Reuters.—AFP/Reuters
