Wealth & Money Quote by Muhammad Yunus

It starts as a tidy piece of institutional pragmatism, then reveals a quiet political thesis: if you want development to stick, route power through the people most likely to convert cash into stability. Yunus frames the shift toward women not as ideology but as evidence-based governance. That’s the rhetorical judo here. By leading with “Soon we saw,” he claims the authority of observation rather than dogma, sidestepping the predictable backlash that “empowering women” can trigger in patriarchal settings and donor boardrooms alike.

The subtext is sharper than the calm tone suggests. “Money going to women” isn’t just money; it’s leverage inside the household. Microcredit, in this telling, is less about entrepreneurship than about who gets to decide what’s urgent: food, school fees, medicine, a tin roof before a new radio. The line “benefit to the family” is doing strategic work, too, translating women’s autonomy into the safest possible language: not justice, not rights, but family outcomes. It’s a moral argument smuggled in as a cost-benefit calculation.

The context matters: Grameen’s rise in rural Bangladesh, where formal banking excluded the poor and women’s access to assets was constrained by custom and law. Microfinance sold itself as a correction to market failure; Yunus is also describing a correction to a social hierarchy. The kicker - “96% of our four million borrowers” - reads like triumph and indictment at once: a statistic that signals scale, but also how thoroughly conventional finance had ignored (or distrusted) women until it became profitable not to.