Grameen Foundation -- Social Entrepreneurship

Recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, Professor Muhammad Yunus is internationally recognized for his work in poverty alleviation and the empowerment of poor women. Professor Yunus has successfully melded capitalism with social responsibility to create the Grameen Bank, a microcredit institution committed to providing small amounts of working capital to the poor for self-employment. From its origins as an action-research project in 1976, Grameen Bank has grown to provide collateral-free loans to 7.2 million clients in nearly 80,000 villages in Bangladesh and 96% of whom are women. Over the last two decades, Grameen Bank has loaned out over 6.5 billion dollars to the poorest of the poor, while maintaining a repayment rate consistently above 98%. The innovative approach to poverty alleviation pioneered by Professor Yunus in a small village in Bangladesh has inspired a global microcredit movement reaching out to millions of poor women from rural South Africa to inner city Chicago. His autobiography, "Banker to the Poor: Microlending and the Battle Against World Poverty," has been translated in French, Italian, Spanish, English, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, Gujarati, Chinese, German, Turkish and Arabic.

Who we are

Mission Statement: Grameen Foundation's mission is to enable the poor, especially the poorest, to create a world without poverty.

With tiny loans, financial services and technology, we help the poor, mostly women, start self-sustaining businesses to escape poverty. Founded in 1997 by a group of friends who were inspired by the work of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, our global network of 55 microfinance institution (MFI) partners, including our Growth Guarantee partners, has touched more than 34 million people in 24 countries. Our partners reach 6.8 million clients, and in addition, we introduced and now sustain technology initiatives (Mifos and Village Phone) in Cameroon, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda, bringing our total country outreach to 28.

Our team is guided by our values and our Grameen heritage, and our work is made possible by supporters who share our passion and commitment for defeating poverty through microfinance. We invite you to learn more about our work through our annual reports.

In this section:
Our People - The cadre of staff, board members and volunteers that help to nurture new ideas, innovations, and strategic thinking for fighting poverty.
Our Supporters - Individuals and organizations that share our passion and commitment for defeating global poverty through microfinance.
Annual Reports - They detail how we operate and where we work and spotlight the many people around the world we serve.
Our Grameen Heritage - The inspiration for the work we do.
Values - A compass that guides our decisions and programs
Awards and Recognition - External recognition of our work.
Partnerships - Strategic alliances that help to increase our impact.

What we do

Microfinance - a powerful poverty-fighting tool:

Microfinance helps people to escape poverty by giving them collateral-free loans and other financial services to support income-generating businesses. As each loan is repaid, the money is redistributed as loans to others, thereby mulitiplying its impact. For Fatima, a FONDEP client in Morocco, the loans have helped her build a business and new horizons for her children.

Learn more about microfinance

Client success stories

We support microfinance programs that enable the poor, mostly women, to lift themselves out of poverty and make better lives for their families. To do this, we partner with a worldwide network of microfinance institutions. Our work focuses on six key areas:

Supporting microfinance institutions

Our partner microfinance institutions (MFIs) work on the front lines daily, meeting the needs of clients and reaching out to others who can benefit from microfinance. To help them be efficient and effective and increase their outreach, we provide microfinance program support in the form of funding, technical assistance, training and new technology.

Harnessing the power of technology

Grameen Foundation's Technology Center is the leader in information and communications technology (ICT) initiatives that are dedicated exclusively to advancing microfinance. To help microfinance reach its full potential, we are driving industry-changing innovations that increase the efficiency of microfinance institutions' operations, create new microbusiness opportunities for the poor, and provide telecommunications access for the world's rural poor.

Connecting microfinance institutions with capital markets

Our Capital Management and Advisory Center is harnessing the vast resources of local and international capital markets to bring new financial resources to our microfinance institution partners. With more than 400 million poor people cut off from financial services, there is a huge, unmet need for microfinance. To reach them, MFIs need capital beyond the traditional philanthropic support to rapidly expand their operations and increase outreach.

Expanding microfinance industry knowledge

New ideas and innovative thinking will drive the expansion and effectiveness of microfinance. Knowledge sharing is an important component of our work. To have the greatest impact on global poverty, we are committed to sharing ideas and innovations with the wider microfinance community. We hope this "open-sourcing" of information will guide other organizations in improving the industry's outreach to the more than one billion people living in abject poverty.

Equipping the microfinance industry with measurement tools

A goal of Grameen Foundation’s work is to ensure our partners are moving their clients out of poverty after five years and to foster good practices for measuring the progress of individuals’ movement across poverty lines. MFIs must show results, yet many do not have the tools to evaluate how well they are fulfilling their mission of reducing poverty, reaching people excluded from financial services, empowering women, or promoting community solidarity. Grameen Foundation's Social Performance tools are designed to fill that need.

Social Business

In January 2008, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus introduced a new term to the business lexicon: social business. Writing in his new book, Creating a World without Poverty, Yunus laid out the framework for two social business models and urged others to adopt them in the fight against global poverty. A social business is social-objective driven. In the first model, the company’s mission is achieved through creating or supporting sustainable "non-loss" business enterprises where all of the profits are ploughed back into the company rather than being distributed to shareholders. The second social business model is one which is profit-driven, but owned and operated entirely by the poor, who receive all company profits.

Learn more about social business on the Grameen Foundation blog.

Grameen Capital India and Grameen-Jameel Pan Arab Microfinance Limited are two social businesses that have already been launched with the support of Grameen Foundation.

Our People
To coordinate the activities of the Grameen Foundation network, we have staff based in Washington, D.C. and at the Grameen Technology Center, Seattle. Overseeing the staff is a Board of Directors. Our Grameen Foundation Advisory Council and our Board Committees and Councils nurture new ideas, innovations, strategic thinking and program development. Much of Grameen Foundation's work is done by our network of volunteers who are committed to our mission, some of whom have been working in partnership with us for more than ten years.

Where we work
Grameen Foundation works to reach the world's poorest people across four continents:
Learn more about our worldwide programs:

South Asia
East and Southeast Asia
Latin America and the Caribbean
The Arab World (Middle East and North Africa)
Sub-Saharan Africa
The United States