Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus has been conferred honorary citizenship of Pistoia, a city in the Tuscany region of Italy.
He was honoured at a programme in the Town Hall yesterday 10/5, Yunus Centre said in a statement.
The event was attended by 300 dignitaries of Pistoia, including government officials, business leaders, heads of foundations, university representatives and social entrepreneurs. Samuele Bertinelli, the mayor of Pistoia, said the city was conferring the honorary citizenship for the Nobel laureate’s services to humanity through the creation of microcredit and social business.
Professor Yunus thanked the mayor and the city for conferring on him the honorary citizenship. He said people had the capability of changing their own lives given the opportunity. Young people should be provided with a chance to become entrepreneurs, not to chase after jobs, Yunus said.
He also talked about the new entrepreneurs programme introduced in Bangladesh which has provided equity capital to 5,000 young people for create business.
Yunus also invited Pistoia to start programmes to turn its unemployed youth into entrepreneurs, according to the statement. About 35 percent of the Italian youth are unemployed.
Pistoia is famous for building and export of train compartments, producing paper and pasta molds and for supplying nursery plants throughout Europe. Pistoia became a social business city in 2013. A special association called Social Business Lab Pistoia supported by the two largest foundations in Pistoia has been created to take the programme forward.
After the ceremony, Yunus visited two social businesses and addressed a gathering of 200 high-school students who had participated in a citywide social business competition.
Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, banker, economist and civil society leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. These loans are given “on trust” to entrepreneurs too poor or too unreliable to qualify for traditional bank loans. In 2006, Yunus and the Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts through microcredit to create economic and social development from below”. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said that “lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty”. Yunus has received several other national and international honours. He received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010.
In 2008, he was rated number 2 in Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the ‘Top 100 Global Thinkers’.
In 2012, he became Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. He is a member of the advisory board at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology. Previously, he was a professor of economics at Chittagong University in Bangladesh. He published several books related to his finance work, translated in many languages. He is a founding board member of Grameen America and Grameen Foundation, which support microcredit.
Yunus also serves on the board of directors of the United Nations Foundation, a public charity created in 1998 by American philanthropist Ted Turner’s $1 billion gift to support UN causes.
In March 2011, the Bangladesh government fired Yunus from his position at his own “Grameen Bank”, citing legal violations and an age limit on his position. Bangladesh’s High Court confirmed the removal on 8 March. Yunus and Grameen Bank appealed the decision, claiming Yunus’ removal was politically motivated (relations between Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Yunus were difficult since early 2007, when Yunus created his own political party in opposition of leading Awami League, an effort he dropped in May 2007).
Source: The Daily Star