Policies are also to blame: the only thing that the governments and people can come up with to give to the poor people is charity. Poor people get hand outs from the state. But this is not a solution to poverty.

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.

I was teaching in one of the universities while the country was suffering from a severe famine. People were dying of hunger, and I felt very helpless. As an economist, I had no tool in my tool box to fix that kind of situation.

Poor people always pay back their loans. [...] It is us, the designers of institutions and rules, who keep creating trouble for them.

Microcredit has shown how you can reach out to people that conventional banking cannot. It has demonstrated that it's a doable proposition.

In the future the question will not be, "Are people credit-worthy", but rather, "Are banks people-worthy?"

I'm finding that knocking at their mindsets is hard work. A simple knock will not make it crawl. I was trying to push it. I was trying to find a bird's eye view where I could find a big solution. So this is what I was trying.