Renowned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Honorary Doctor of Laws, honoris causa at 2 p.m. on September 1, 2011 in recognition of “outstanding contributions in sustainable international development”. He also delivered the Convocation Address to an enthusiastic audience.
Dr. Yunus established the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983 in an effort to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them and by teaching them sound financial principles so they could help themselves. Replicas of the Grameen Bank model operate in more than 100 countries worldwide.
In 2006, Dr. Yunus and the bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.”
Former U.S. President Barack Obama awarded Dr.Yunus with the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour. He is a member of the board of the United Nations Foundation. His numerous other international awards include the Mohamed Shabdeen Award for Science (1993), Sri Lanka; Humanitarian Award (1993), CARE, USA; World Food Prize (1994), World Food Prize Foundation, USA; lndependence Day Award (1987), Bangladesh’s highest award; King Hussein Humanitarian Leadership Award (2000),Franklin D. Roosevelt Freedom Award (2006), Roosevelt Institute of The Netherlands; and the Seoul Peace Prize (2006), Seoul Peace Prize Cultural Foundation, and many more.
Born in 1940 in the seaport city of Chittagong, he studied at Dhaka University in Bangladesh, then received a Fulbright Scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University. He received his PhD in economics from Vanderbilt in 1969 and, the following year, became an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University. Returning to Bangladesh, Dr. Yunus headed the economics department at Chittagong University.
From 1993 to 1995, Professor Yunus was a member of the International Advisory Group for the Fourth World Conference on Women, a post to which he was appointed by the UN secretary general. He has served on the Global Commission of Women’s Health, the Advisory Council for Sustainable Economic Development and the UN Expert Group on Women and Finance.