Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus made a big social impact by helping small businesses. In 1974, with the country battered by a string of catastrophic famines, natural disasters and a devastating war of independence, Yunus sowed the seeds for the microfinance movement by extending small loans to village women making handicrafts.
The loans were an alternative to the high rates charged by local moneylenders and enabled many women to make major improvements in their living conditions.
As an academic, Yunus had despaired that his conventional courses were not easing the poverty in Bangladesh. Through the creation of Grameen Bank, and later Grameen Phone, he was able to demonstrate that the key to overcoming poverty was to unleash the 'energy and creativity in each human being'.
According to Yunus, charity simply creates dependency and eradicates the desire of a person to break through the barriers of poverty.
As Michael Strong, author of Be the Solution, says, who would have thought a quarter of a century ago that illiterate rural women working in groups of five had the resources to pay back hundreds of millions of dollars in micro loans? Strong contends that the success of the microfinance movement is an example of how entrepreneurs can spot potential in an otherwise unheralded situation and that self-sustaining businesses can be vehicles to solve the world's biggest problems. He advocates the rise of a new breed of businessperson, 'conscious capitalists' who can make the planet a better place if they have access to property rights, the rule of law and economic freedom.
Strong and John Mackey, the chief executive of US organic retailer Whole Foods Market, are co-founders of an organisation called Flow, which aims to liberate the 'entrepreneurial spirit for good', whether that is in health, politics, education or business.