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Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, it was over 20 years ago when I was a Member of the House of Representatives that one of my colleagues Mike Synar, then a Congressman from Oklahoma, asked me if I would like to join him on a trip.

I said: Where do you want to go, Mike? I'm not all that popular back home in my district, so you better pick a place that we can explain. He said: I am going to take you to a place that no one will ever complain about. I would like you to go with me to Bangladesh.

I said: Where is that? He said: I will show you. And off we went to Bangladesh halfway around the world. It was a great trip. It is a poor country that has been through a lot of political turmoil. It has had more than its share of natural disasters, and they are a remarkable people.

During the course of that trip, I was introduced to an economics professor at the university. He was an interesting character. He would come up with a theory that he thought would help the poorest people on earth. It was known as microcredit, and he created something called the Grameen Bank, the people's bank.

And, basically, what he set out to do was to prove that you could loan a small amount of money to the poorest people on earth and dramatically change their lives.

They would pay it back, and they would start to be more constructive, more profitable in what they were doing. It was just a theory at the time, but he is starting to prove it. We kept in touch after leaving that visit, and I watched over the years as he expanded the concept.

Pretty soon, there were cell phones in these tiny little villages in Bangladesh. One person would own a cell phone and sell minutes on the phone for people to call in to the nearest city to see if this was the right time to bring their produce to market.

His name was Muhammad Yunus, and he caught the attention not just of this Congressman--now a Senator--but he caught the attention of the world. When it was all said and done, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in economics.

I thought he was extraordinary and should be recognized here as well, so I led the effort with the late Senator Mike Enzi and Congressman Rush Holt to award the Congressional Gold Medal to this remarkable economics professor--Dr. Muhammad Yunus. He was sometimes known as the ``Banker to the Poor'' after he received the Nobel Prize.

He pioneered microlending as a groundbreaking method of helping some of the world's poorest people. He recognized that, just with a little bit of money in hand, many people could lift themselves out of poverty, but traditional banks wouldn't lend small sums to the poor, particularly the women who were poor. Banks saw such loans as too risky, not profitable, and unworthy.

Dr. Yunus never gave up. He saw things differently, with incredible results. Through his Grameen Bank, he proved that microlending could be done collateral-free and investing in poor women actually paid off. In fact, most of Grameen Bank's loans have gone to poor women who rise from terrible poverty to become small business people.

I have seen the results of that innovative approach all over the world now, including a visit to a ramshackle hut in Uganda, where I met three mothers who were working in a local market. I asked them, through an interpreter, how microcredit had changed their lives. One woman said: ``My knees have gone soft.'' I didn't understand what she meant. I asked her to explain.

She said: Before I got my microcredit loan, which gave me a chance to go to the market and make a little money, I used to have to crawl on my knees to beg my husband for money to feed the children. I don't have to crawl anymore. My knees have gone soft.

I will never forget that exchange.

In recent decades, more than 140 million people on 5 continents have received microloans with incredible repayment rates and success. Quite simply, Dr. Muhammad Yunus's ideas changed the World and helped to earn him that Nobel Peace Prize.

Tragically, his ideas also earned him the wrath of the Bangladeshi Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, whose government harassed Dr. Yunus for years with questionable legal charges and threatened jail time.

So imagine my surprise last month--just a few weeks ago, during this break. Hasina finally resigned as Prime Minister of Bangladesh amidst massive public protest, and the students who were leading the protest demanded that the leader of their country be none other than Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the same economics professor I met more than 20 years ago. They asked him to create a caretaker government and hold new elections, which he is in the process of doing.

I called him on the phone when I heard of his good fortune and the fact that he is now the leader of that nation. I asked him what I could do to help, and he said: We need so much help to stabilize the economy and move forward with this poor nation. I will be coming to the United Nations in the next few weeks.

I hope to get the chance to see him. I hope he can make it down here to Washington.

He was upbeat. He believes the people of that country are prepared now to rise to this historic opportunity.

I am going to offer my full support to him today. I believe in him. I did 20 years ago, and I do today. I urge President Biden to support him as well. I know Dr. Yunus has the best interest of the Bangladeshi people at heart and will do his utmost in this challenging time.

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