Five facts on Nobel peace prize winner Yunus

Undated, Oct 13 (Reuters) Bangladesh's Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize today for efforts to create grassroots social and economic development.

The following are five facts about Yunus: * In 1974, Yunus, head of the rural economics programme at the University of Chittagong, led his students on a field trip to rural Bangladesh where a famine had killed thousands of people. The experience changed his life.

* Realising that small amounts of credit could revolutionise the fate of poor communities, he started by lending the equivalent of 27 dollars to a group of female basket weavers to expand their businesses. The idea was the seed for the Grameen Bank, which was formed in 1983 to extend banking facilities and improve the provision of credit to the rural poor.

* Yunus' philosophy is to help the poor help themselves. He never responds when a beggar holds out his or her hand for money.

* His dream is the total eradication of poverty from the world. ''Grameen is a message of hope, a programme for putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long,'' he says.

* Yunus, 66, is proud that his model of empowering the rural poor through micro-credit has spread around the world and even the World Bank has embraced an idea which it initially doubted.

REUTERS SP BS1558