Learn English with Muhammad Yunus. Join him as he delivers a compelling keynote speech at the UC San Diego Commencement 2016. Yunus shares his transformative vision for eradicating poverty through microfinance, empowering individuals to become job creators instead of job seekers. Discover how social businesses can tackle global challenges by focusing on solutions rather than profit.
Who This Speech Is For
Learners interested in social entrepreneurship, poverty eradication, and global impact.
Those who want to improve their ability to discuss economic systems, financial inclusion, and innovation.
Intermediate to advanced English learners studying visionary, persuasive, and storytelling-rich speech techniques.
How This Speech Helps Your English
Learn how clear logic and personal storytelling make a speech deeply inspiring.
Expand vocabulary related to banking, entrepreneurship, social impact, and economic reform.
Observe how real-world examples and rhetorical contrasts enhance argumentation.
Understand how to advocate for systemic change with empathy and confidence.
Why This Speech Matters
A groundbreaking speech on reimagining capitalism through social business and human dignity.
Demonstrates how innovative thinking can challenge entrenched systems and create inclusive solutions.
Encourages learners to think like creators, not just job seekers—and to work for a world with zero poverty, zero unemployment, and zero carbon emissions.
”Unleash your limitless potential.
Transcript
Today, we bring you an inspiring speech by Smita Sabharwal, an IAS officer known for her impactful leadership and commitment to public service. Speaking at DRDO on Women’s Day, she highlights the importance of gender equality in leadership, the obstacles women face in the workforce, and the need for systemic change to support women’s career advancement. She encourages women to step forward, take on challenges, and claim their rightful place in leadership roles.
Congratulations to all the UC San Diego graduates. And also, congratulations to the parents and the friends who are attending this memorable occasion this morning. I came here all the way from Bangladesh, so I have to give you the greetings from the other side of the planet, so I come almost halfway coming here, and it’s worth it.
You are graduating from UC San Diego. This is a special privilege. You remember how many young people in the world don’t has a chance to go to school, how many of them can’t make it to college, and those who get to college never make it to finish it. And you’re privileged, not only you went to college, you went to UC San Diego, one of the most dominant universities, top universities in the world. You just heard from the chancellor.
So this privilege that you have, you have to remember, and you have to ask yourself what use you’re going to make of it. That’s important thing. Preparing for life is one part, and using it, using that preparation is another part. So that’s the question I’ll be raising with you and probably you’ll be raising with yourselves beginning today to making sure you make good use of it.
And my journey began in the campus of another university back in Bangladesh, Chittagong University. And Bangladesh is full of problems, as you can imagine, and when I went back after finishing my PhD here, it was extreme kind of problems in the country. And I felt that I’m a lucky person that I’m from Bangladesh, I was born in Bangladesh. It has so many problems. If you lift a finger, you can touch hundreds of problems right around you. And that’s exciting for a young personto look at those problems and see what I can do about it. There are so many of them, I can do something about it.
And I wonder, if I was born in a country where there’s no problem, what would have happened to me? Every time I think about it, I feel I’ll be bored to death. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. There’s no problem. So this is how I reacted to it, and I didn’t wait for any pre-packaged solutions. I always tried to do in my own way. I look at the problem, I try to figure out the solution on my own, in my own way. I didn’t wait for anybody else to help me.
When I saw the problem in the village about the loan sharking, it’s a kind of age-old problem everywhere in the region, everywhere in the world, but nobody seemed to do anything about it, and I see face-to-face in a village next door to the university campus. Suddenly offered to me I can do something about it, why don’t I lend money myself? If I lend money, they don’t have to go, people don’t have to go to loan sharks, then the problem is solved. What’s the big deal?
So I started lending money out of my own pocket. It’s a very tiny amount of money needed. And I saw how eagerly they were coming to me to borrow that money so that they don’t have to go to loan shark. And that was the beginning of something which I never dreamed of would happen, creating something called microcredit. And I started lending money, it just expanded, created a bank out of it. It started in 1976. We converted it into a bank, formal bank, in 1983, and it became a nationwide bank.
And the thing that we do became known as microcredit, microfinance, and every other one country wanted to imitate that, follow that. Today, in Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank, the bank that I created, has over eight and a half million borrowers, mostly women, 97% of them are women, destitute women who joined Grameen Bank. Not only they borrow money from Grameen Bank, they own the bank itself. They sit in the board of the bank, they decide the policies of the bank, so it’s a very strange bank in that way. It’s a bank owned by poor women and it’s a bank which is run by poor women as our policymakers.
And we have been… Let me take it off, so… It’s trying to blow away. It’s a bank which at the service of the poor women everywhere. The basic principle that we put right away, people should not come to bank, bank should go to people. Still, wherever the microcredit programs are done, it’s the same principle. They don’t have to come to the program. The people go and serve them at their doorstep. So all these eight and a half million borrowers in all the villages of Bangladesh, which is 80,000 villages in Bangladesh, we meet them every week, serve them at their doorstep.
And people think lending tiny little money is what is microcredit. That’s not true. As such, the whole microcredit is challenging the existing banking system. We are almost opposite of the conventional banking. People tell me, “How did you decide the rules and policies of the bank? How do you design all those things, all the intricate details?” I say, “It’s very simple. Whenever we needed a policy and we did a rule, we just look at the conventional bank, how they do it, then we do the other way. We do the opposite.” They go to the rich, we go to the poor. They go to men, we go to women. They go to the city center, we go to remote villages.
Even today, after 40 years of our work, still there’s not a single branch of Grameen Bank. Grameen Bank has 2,600 branches in the country of Bangladesh, not a single branch is located in any city, any town, any township in the country. It’s all in the village. So we reversed that. Conventional banks ask for collateral. We dismissed that thing. We said, “It’s a wall which separates people, poor people, from the banking system.” We just do business on the basis of trust. Since there is no collateral, there is no document, there is no legal document between the lender and the borrower. Since there is no legal document, there is no lawyer, there’s no lawyer in our bank. It’s the only bank in the world which is lawyer free.
You can walk in any time and ask for a loan, provided you are a poor person. Only thing you have to substantiate very satisfactorily that you are extremely poor. Again, this is the reverse of the banking system. In the banking system, you have to explain how rich you are… and then they give money. And their rule is, the more you have, the more you can get. So we reversed the entire banking system.
Today, almost half the population of the entire world is deprived from the banking services. We wanted to fill that. See, it’s not impossible to do that. So the whole thing began because I tried to do something in a way I thought it will be a solution for the people to stay away from the loan sharks. Now, that became a challenge to the entire banking system, because most of the problem we created in the world is because of the banking system.
Take the case of wealth concentration. All the wealth of the world is concentrated in few hands. 99% of the wealth of the world is owned by 1% of the population. If you reverse it, 99% of the population of the world own only 1% of the wealth of the world. That’s not a good world, that’s a challenge to you. How do you reverse it? That’s what you have to think, because this is not sustainable, each day it’s becoming worse. So if you keep on doing exactly the way we do it, tomorrow there’ll be 99.5% of the world owned by less than 1% of the population of the world, and it will get worse day after tomorrow.
So that’s a challenge we have to take and make it the other way, and we continue to look for those solutions. We look at the problems that the poor people face, many problems, health problems, education problems, sanitation problems, you name it. Every time I see a problem in the village that I work in, I try to address that problem by creating a business, and I created a business after business because there is so many, there are so many problems, so I create, keep on creating businesses to solve those problem.
And people say, “Why are you doing that? You must be making a lot of money by doing this business.” I said, “No, I don’t make any money out of these businesses.” “Then why do you run businesses?” Because… then my answer is, “I enjoy it.” So they can figure out what, how can one run business without making money for himself and he says he enjoys it. I said, “Is there any law in the country that if you decide not to take profit from the company you’ll be punished for that?” I said, “There is no law, so I’m just taking advantage of it. I don’t take the profit out of the company. The entire company is devoted to solving problems.”
Then I realized, again, I’m challenging something else, the whole concept of business itself. There’s only one concept of business in the whole world, business to make money, personal money. And I said, “No, I don’t want to make personal money, I want to solve problems.” And I started calling these kind of businesses as social businesses, and defined it by saying it’s a non-dividend company to solve human problems, and I continued to create those things, and gradually it became very noticeable. Some big companies wanted to do business with us, we agreed to do that.
Among the many things that I created as a social business, one, I’ll just give one example out of many in Bangladesh. Bangladesh doesn’t have much of electricity, villagers don’t have electricity, they have solar, they have just lamps, kerosene lamps. And 22 years back, I thought, “Why don’t we bring solar energy into Bangladesh?” I have no idea about solar energy, all I read in the newspaper, that’s all. So I talked to people who knows about solar energy, they said, “No, it doesn’t fit good in Bangladesh. It’s good for Europe, it’s good for North America, but not for Bangladesh.” And I said, “Why not?” So I figured that out, I said, “I can make it happen.”
I created a business, created a company called Grameen Shakti or Grameen Energy, and it started selling solar home system in the villages. In the beginning, this was extremely difficult to sell four or five solar home system per month, but we never give it up, we continued. Twenty years later, we were selling 1,000 solar home system per day. It became a huge business, a social business. Today, we have more than two million households in Bangladesh with solar energy. It became so popular through our company that other people came in, NGOs came in, companies came in to sell solar home system. In total today, more than four million homes in Bangladesh are served by solar energy, just out of nowhere. So this became largest off-grid solar system in the whole world. So this what become.
So it’s an idea, an idea. You don’t have to know everything. I didn’t know anything about banking and people tell me, “What is the best thing that happened that you could create Grameen Bank?” I said, “Best thing that happened to me, I never took a course in banking.” “I didn’t have to learn anything about it. Since I didn’t know anything, I could do anything I want.” Sometimes not knowing the details is a blessing, you can figure it out yourself. And when you figure it out, it will be different than what is in the book. So don’t give up on something that you don’t know, always take advantage of it, make sure it happens.
I mentioned lots of big businesses are doing business with us, they are interested in social business. I’ll just give example, one example. We have done many, like with Danone, with Veolia, with BSF, with McCain of Canada. The one from the US, we do the business joint venture with Intel Corporation. What we have done, we are very worried about the maternal death in Bangladesh, so out of Intel Corporations’ collaborations, we designed a part of bangles, the bangle which will give you two things.
One, give you the signals or alarm when the air quality in the home, in the house that you’re working goes above a certain level, because fume hits, hurts the pregnant women and their baby. So we wanted to check, because one of the cause of death in Bangladesh, major cause of death in Bangladesh is the air quality in the, inside the kitchen, so we wanted to address that. So this bangle, this beautiful piece of ornament, if you look at it, nobody will suspect that you’re wearing very high-tech ornament in your hand. It gives you, that gives you a alarm bell as soon as the quality of the air goes above a certain level, and it gives you a voice message, “Get out of the house, open all the windows and doors until you have a better air quality and you come back.”
Then also it gives voice messages, “This is the fifth month of your pregnancy, these are the symptoms that you’ll feel. If you feel that way, it’s okay, this is normal, don’t worry about it. If you have symptoms like this, press this button, we’ll get in touch with you.” So this is a communication, this is a kind of giving advice to young women. We are trying to make more and more into that bangle so that nobody has to die at childbirth. It’s a common thing all over the world, the women die at childbirth because they don’t know it was a risky pregnancy. We are trying to identify the risky pregnancies. So we continue to do that.
One of the major problem that we face, the children of Grameen families, their parents are illiterate. We wanted to make sure all the children go to school, so it became part of Grameen Bank’s program to encourage their parents to send their children to school, and we achieved 100% enrollment by the children of Grameen families. And then they came to college… We gave them education loans so that they can go to the college so they don’t have to worry about money and many went to higher education, went to get their master’s degree, get their PhDs. Grameen Bank provided the support.
Then it created a problem, thousands and thousands of those young people coming out of the colleges and universities with degrees, no jobs. They keep complaining, “Why did we have education? There is no job.” In the beginning, I didn’t know how to respond to that, then I figured out what to say, then I challenged them. I said, “Who asked you to have a job?” They couldn’t answer that question. “Did your book tell you that you have to have a job? Did your teacher tell you to have a job?” And I tell them, “Always remember, job is a wrong idea.” Don’t even ever look for a job. Always tell yourself that, “I’m a job creator, I’m not a job seeker, I’m a job creator.” So be a job creator.
This is a fundamental thing that remained with me. I believe, I believe that all human beings are born as entrepreneurs and we are told, go the wrong direction, “Look for jobs.” I said, “Human being are packed with unlimited creative capacity and if you take a job, that’s when most of the cases, that’s the end of your creativity.” Even if you accept, if you are allowed some part of your creativity to be used in your job, mostly in selling some insignificant product, insignificant things, that’s about the creativity you can use. Otherwise, it’s a repetitive process.
A human being who is full of energy, full of creative capacity, taking a job sacrificing the totality of this creativity and rest of the life and kind of stay in a little corner of their creative, creative life. So I said, “Don’t ever dream of that. Be a creative person, remain it, become an entrepreneur.” So in order to make it happen, so what we did we create a social business fund and ask every young person, “Come with a business idea. And once you come up with a business idea, we invest in your business, we become your partner, we invest all the money that you need, and it’s a joint venture between you and us. Make it successful, return the money we gave you. We are a social business, we are not interested in your profit, we are a problem-solving business. So we solve your problem, you, we put you on the orbit, you go wherever you want to go.”
And they love it. Initially, we started with hundreds, now we have thousands of them coming with business ideas and hopefully there will be multiples of thousands very soon and every month we go that. Everybody turns themselves into entrepreneurs. People say… even they were arguing that, “Oh, some of us may not be entrepreneur.” I said, “Look, that’s not true. Look at your mother. Your mother is a Grameen Bank borrower, she started with a tiny loan, $30, $20 and she turned herself into an entrepreneur.” If millions of these women, illiterate women can become entrepreneur, what good is your education if you’re looking for jobs and then sit idle, say, “I am, I am unemployed.”
No human being should remain unemployed… So one of the thing… unemployment is totally artificial concept created by our own thinking. When we came to this planet, we are not sitting around in the caves saying that we are unemployed. We’re not sending job applications from cave number 5 to cave number 10. “Do you have a job?” We are natural entrepreneurs, we are go-getters, we are problem solvers. Our education system made us forget that, made us into tiny little job seekers.
So unless we come out of this, discover ourself, that’s the chance you got, discover yourself, be somebody that you want to be and find out who you are, what you want to do, what’s the purpose of your life, without defining your purpose of life, everything become immaterial, it doesn’t have any, any direction. So what I do, I put my purpose of life or my destination of life in three zeros.
Zero number one, zero poverty in the world. This is what I work for every day. So that we can create a world… We can create a world there’s not a single person in anywhere in the world will remain a poor person. And then when I say we create poverty museums so the next generation will go to the poverty museums to find out what poverty used to be like. And that’s the goal, it’s a doable goal, there’s nothing wrong with human being, only system put us in the wrong direction. So we have to undo that system which push us into the wrong direction. We have to fix the financial system, we have to fix the education system so that we discover ourself, our worth, we unleash our energy, unleash our creative capacity rather than become job seekers. The education system should not end with the job application, educational system will end with the grand ideas about creating a new world.
Zero number two, for me, zero unemployment in the world. Again, I said there is no reason why anybody anywhere in the world should be unemployed, why anybody in the world should be on welfare, why anybody in the world just be homeless, there’s no reason whatsoever. The same human quality exist in every single human being.
Third zero is zero net carbon emission. We have to do it, we can do it. Finally, the nonbelievers are coming to become believers, we had a signed agreement in Paris and we make sure we make it happen very fast. It can be done.
When we put all this together, three zeros implemented, all the zeros are accomplished, we lay down the foundation of another world. We create new civilization for us. The old civilization that we are going through is not something take us out of the problems that we got because our thinking is wrong, our formulations are wrong. So we have to reformulate, we have to create a new civilization which coming out of the civilization which based on… personal selfishness, the civilization based on greed, we have to get out of that selfishness and get out of that greed and create a civilization based on human values.
That’s the challenge you have and we can make it together. That’s the challenge, we take it and that’s what is worthwhile going to UC San Diego and make it happen.
Thank you very much.
