We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions - like the banking institutions, and other institutions; if we redesign our policies, if we look back on our concepts, so that we have a different idea of poor people.

An individual poor person is an isolated island by himself and herself. IT can end that isolation overnight.

My vision for the future? Two things: to make credit a human right so that each individual human being will have the opportunity to take loans and implement his or her ideas so that self-exploration becomes possible. And second: that it will lead to a world where nobody has to suffer from poverty - a world completely free from poverty.

I was an economist now turning into a human being - as if these are two different things. I don't know but I did that and then I had no vision.

The developing world is full of entrepreneurs and visionaries, who with access to education, equity and credit would play a key role in developing the economic situations in their countries.

But we have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities.

When you get a mobile phone it is almost like having a card to get you out of poverty in a couple of years.