Coming to America: The Grameen Bank Comes to Queens

Sept. 30, 2007 — -- Muhammad Yunus has come a long way since he first began giving money to poor people in his homeland of Bangladesh 31 years ago.

"I started giving them money out of my own pocket. The first loan I gave was to 42 people, a total of $27," he told ABC News. "And that got them so excited that I thought I should continue with this."

Since then, his revolutionary micro credit organization called the Grameen Bank (which means "village bank" in Bangladesh) has loaned money to 7½ million people and earned Yunus the Nobel Peace Prize.

It's an impressive track record. But now, Yunus is preparing to tackle what may his biggest challenge yet. He is bringing the concept of the Grameen Bank to America.

"We are locating it in Queens, New York City, where we see lots of immigrants living there -- and they are the ones, the most enterprising ones," Yunus told "This Week" during an interview at the Clinton Global Initiative. "And we thought, maybe, this is one area where we can test out all those ideas that we have. ... Then we can expand it in many other areas -- both within New York City and any other city anywhere in the U.S."

Yunus chose a working class neighborhood in Queens to launch Grameen America. . His colleague and right-hand man, Shah Newaz, who was a student of the Nobel Prize winner 30 years ago, has moved his family to New York from Bangladesh to run the project under the direct supervision of Yunus.

The Grameen office, where the door is always open in the Bangladeshi tradition, is a modest room down a flight of stairs under a doctor's office. Every day, Newaz walks along Jackson Avenue, going into one storefront after another, asking shop owners if they know groups of women who might want to borrow money.

Newaz is looking for women because it was loaning money to poor women that made the Grameen Bank a success in Bangladesh. Today, it has a repayment rate of nearly 99 percent, and 97 percent of Grameen's borrowers are women.