📍Chittagong, Bangladesh
1940 – 1957“Muhammad Yunus was born in 1940 in the village of Bathua, near Hathazari, outside Chittagong, the third of fourteen children, nine of whom survived. When he was a small boy, the family moved into the city of Chittagong, where his father, Hazi Dula Mia, opened a jewellery shop in the busy old bazaar. The streets of the old bazaar were full of traders and craftsmen, and Yunus grew up watching how small businesses worked and how hard their owners struggled. His mother, Sufia Khatun, was the strongest influence of his early years. She was generous to the poor people who came to the door, and her kindness taught him to care about those who had little. When he was about nine, she fell seriously ill with a mental illness, and the family's life changed; Yunus and his siblings learned to look after one another. At Lamabazar Primary School and then Chittagong Collegiate School he was an excellent student, and he was a keen Boy Scout, travelling with the scouts to a world jamboree as far afield as Canada, which opened his eyes to the wider world. He studied economics in Dhaka and in the United States, then returned to teach at Chittagong University. After the famine of 1974 he began taking his students to the nearby village of Jobra, and in 1976 he lent 27 dollars to a group of women who made bamboo stools, so that they could escape moneylenders. That small loan grew into Grameen Bank and the idea of microcredit, which won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. The bazaar shops and the generosity of his mother's home were where his ideas about business and poverty first took root.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today