“If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty.”
― Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
Microfinance recognizes that poor people are remarkable reservoirs of energy and knowledge, posing an untapped opportunity to create markets, bring people in from the margins and give them the tools with which to help themselves.
― Kofi Annan
Microfinance stands as one of the most promising and cost-effective tools in the fight against global poverty.
― Jonathan Morduch
For many years now, I have been impressed by the power of a simple, small loan to those for whom fate and circumstance have resulted in disadvantage. Maintaining peoples integrity and showing them trust, whilst facilitating a way for them to rebuild their own lives is such a meaningful way of alleviating poverty. By placing microfinance in the global spotlight, awareness of this most effective anti-poverty tool will undoubtedly, and thankfully, increase
― Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan Emissary for the International Year of Microcredit 2005
Microfinance is much more than simply an income generation tool. By directly empowering poor people, particularly women, it has become one of the key driving mechanisms towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
― Mark Malloch Brown, Chef de Cabinet, Office of the Secretary General to the United Nations
Microcredit is about giving hope. When you’re talking about making loans to women whose income is less than $1 a day, you can easily make the leap to see what a microloan can make possible. The women I’ve met in Uganda and Guatemala are so resourceful, and it’s just amazing to see how, with their courage and diligence, they create small businesses with such tiny amounts of money. These women work so hard, and they manage to pay off their loans, and the first thing they do is educate and feed their kids. It’s amazing that the world is not investing more in this resource.
― Natalie Portman
Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Give a woman microcredit, she, her husband, her children and her extended family will eat for a lifetime.
― Bono
The poor themselves can create a poverty-free world. All we have to do is to free them from the chains that we have put around them!
― Muhammad Yunus
My dream is to find individuals who take financial resources and convert them into changing the world in the most positive ways.
― Jeff Skoll
When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.
― Muhammad Yunus, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
