Nobel laureate launches music video for eye health

OSLO, Dec 13 (Reuters) Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus helped launch a pop music record and video today that will raise money to build eye hospitals in Bangladesh.

Yunus yesterday said he hoped the music would help spread his message about fighting poverty to young people around the globe. He won the 2006 peace prize with the Grameen Bank he founded to lend money to the poor of Bangladesh.

All the proceeds from the CD record and DVD ''Hear Me Now'' by the young British-Norwegian group The Green Children will go to Yunus's Grameen Healthcare Trust, the band's Norwegian vocalist Milla Sunde and British pianist Tom Bevan said.

Sunde and Bevan became involved in the microcredit movement -- the lending of tiny sums to poor people -- a few years ago and met Yunus in Bangladesh this year and decided to adopt his cause as their own.

''I was very taken by that idea,'' said Yunus who received the peace prize at an award ceremony in Oslo on Sunday. ''Through them we can communicate with their peers around the world.'' Sunde said that if the band succeeds in selling even a third of the records they plan to issue they will be able to build one eye hospital in Bangladesh and three if they sell them all.

Yunus has said that he will use his part of the 1.46 million dollars Nobel prize money to fund what he calls a ''social business'' in the area of healthcare.

As examples of such social businesses which pay no dividend, he has mentioned eye hospitals and a joint venture with French food group Danone to produce vitamin-fortified yoghurt for the malnournished children of Bangladesh.

REUTERS LL DS1051