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Commonwealth Secretariat press release

Professor Muhammad Yunus to deliver Sixth Commonwealth Lecture

7 March 2003

The founder and managing director of Grameen Bank, Professor Muhammad Yunus, will give the Sixth Commonwealth Lecture in London on Tuesday 11 March 2003. His talk will be on the theme Halving Poverty by 2015: we can actually make it happen.

In founding the Grameen Bank, Professor Yunus originated the concept of banking without collateral for the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh. The Bank, through 1,178 branches, has provided loans to over 2.4 million poor people, mainly women, in 41,536 villages in Bangladesh.
Professor Yunus is the recipient of many international awards. In 2002, he was appointed an International Goodwill Ambassador for UNAIDS by the United Nations.

Announcing the lecture today, Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon said, "Like most great ideas, the concept behind Grameen Bank is extremely simple: trust poor people, extend credit and they will take themselves out of poverty. Grameen Bank is the living proof that with original ideas and a strong will, poverty can be beaten."


Note to Editors:
The Lecture will be held at the Commonwealth Institute at 6.30 p.m. and it will be followed by a question and answer session. For press invitations and other queries call the Communications and Public Affairs Division, Commonwealth Secretariat on + 44 (0) 20 7747 6382/6383.
The inaugural Commonwealth Lecture, entitled Human Rights: Is there a Commonwealth Perspective?, was delivered in 1998 by Professor Amartya Sen, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the 1998 Nobel Laureate for Economics. Subsequent annual lectures have been delivered by the Rt Hon Malcolm Fraser, former Prime Minister of Australia, who spoke on Globalisation and the Nation State; Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary-General and winner of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize whose title was Africa: Maintaining the Momentum; Mrs Graça Machel, President of the Foundation for Community Development and Chair of the Commonwealth Foundation, whose topic was Gender Inequality: From Roles to Rights and Mary Robinson, then United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who spoke on Human Rights in the Shadow of 11 September.

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ISSUED BY THE COMMUNICATIONS AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS DIVISION
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Email: info@commonwealth.int