Five of us travelled to Dhaka this week- we got a rare chance to interview 7 of grameen's longest serving people and 2 of its newer folk recruited to expand social business and future capitalism worldwide

its not often these 9 are all in Dhaka at teh same time but they were preparing for the opeing of a new musuem of microcredit which the Nobel committee had asked them to build- Yunus himself was rushing back from the annual microsoft partners conference where he had keynoted and a basketball stadium had been needed to accomopdate the audience http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A J1tfWtshDc

if you have a question such as we know a group who are seriously interested in starting microcredit n XYZ, how would we go about understanding how grameen could help, I will both try to answer it and externally email my 5 comrades to see if they have better ideas than mine

In a month or so I hope that I will also be able to publish the full transcripts of our interviews- Muhammad Yunus wanted to have a look at them first before we go public which is fair enough since back in january in new york we approached him to say that the world of youth would like to hear from the whole of his organisation, and he responded warmly whilst making it clear this would be a new activity for many people who are used to serving the grassroots memebership but not to the sorts of pressures of being examined as a candidate for the best 25000 person organisation humanity has ever been served by

Whilst I personally rate Dr Yunus as the most interesting entrepreneur in the world, I was quite unprepared for meeting

the 3 men who have teamworked together since the first loan in Jobra

the two ladies who have been the backbone of grameen culture since the early days

four others with amazing stories to tell too; the range of Grameen may be best described like this- every time Grameen is invited to a new region, it makes a passionate attempt to find the poorest of the poor and start the first branch there; conversely 31 years into this some grameen villages are now quite far above the poverty line and these are now taking on loans at an enterprise and not just an individual level of worth. Over time, its an amazing entrepreneurial celebration of what humanity can do-the poor people's bank has now inspired worldwide over 140 microcredit partners in knowhow exchanges, developed bangladesh's largest business -Grameen phone- probably the largest solar energy installation businwss in any nation .. is currently attempting to deliver clean water at 1000 times cheaper than any other pay-for water service, and so forth