This is not charity. This is business: business with a social objective, which is to help people get out of poverty.

I avoid grandiose plans. I start with a small piece that I can do. I go to the root of the problem and then work around it. It's building brick by brick.

We have done some of these in Bangladesh. Whenever I see a problem, I immediately go and create a company. That's what I did all my life.

Long live Grameen Bank. Let the power of poor women prevail.

The new millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size.

I have come to believe, deeply and firmly, that we can create a poverty free world if we want to. I came to this conclusion not as a product of a pious dream, but as a concrete result of experience gained in the work of the Grameen Bank.

They explained to me that the bank cannot lend money to poor people because these people are not creditworthy.