A second type of social business falls within the profit-maximizing scheme employed by most companies today. A company guided by the principle of profit maximization may be designed as a social business by giving full or majority ownership to the poor. Grameen Bank falls under this category of social business: it is owned by the poor. The poor can obtain shares of these companies as gifts from donors, or they can buy the shares with their own money. In the case of Grameen Bank, the borrowers buy non-transferable shares with their own money, while a committed professional team does the day-to-day running of the bank. Social business of this type may be created quite easily through cooperation with bilateral and multilateral donors. When a donor intends to give a loan or a grant to build a bridge in the recipient country, it could create instead a “bridge company” owned by the local poor. Profits would go to the local poor as dividend and could go toward projects such as the building of more bridges. A wide array of infrastructure projects—the construction of roads, highways, airports, seaports, and utilities—could all be completed in this manner.

Grameen Bank has created two social businesses of the first type. One is a yogurt factory that produces fortified yogurt for the nutrition of malnourished children, a joint venture with Danone. The company Grameen-Danone will provide nutritious yogurt to poor people for a cost of around Tk.5, which is significantly less than the over Tk. 50 market price of similar products. The joint venture will continue to expand until all malnourished children in Bangladesh have access to fortified yogurt. A second social business initiated by Grameen is a chain of eye-care hospitals. Each hospital will undertake, on average, 10,000 cataract surgeries per year and offer prices that are affordable for the poor.

There is also great potential in the intersection of social business principles and access to technological innovation. I see great opportunity for the poor to change their lives, if only they could harness the power of inexpensive, instantaneous communication and technology to meet their needs. An example of a project that resulted from this vision was a mobile phone company, Grameen Phone. Loans from Grameen Bank allowed poor women to buy mobile phones, which they then used to sell phone service in villages. The synergy of microcredit and information technology created a successful phone business and a coveted enterprise for Grameen borrowers. In Bangladesh, over 300,000 telephone ladies, as they are called, quickly learned and innovated in the business of telephone service, and the mobile phone business has become a quick way to move out of poverty and to earn social respectability. It is my hope to ultimately turn Grameen Phone into a social business, with majority ownership transferred to poor women while continuing to benefit communities by providing useful products and services.

To connect investors with social businesses, we also need to create a social stock market in which only the shares of social businesses will be traded. Investors will come to this stock exchange with the clear intention of finding a social business with a mission they would like to support. To enable such a social stock-exchange to function properly, we will need to establish rating agencies, standardize terminology and definitions, and create impact measurement tools, reporting formats, and new financial publications, perhaps something like The Social Wall Street Journal. Business schools will need to offer courses and social business management degrees. Such instruction will be key in training young managers to administer social business enterprises in the most efficient manner, and, most of all, in inspiring them to become social business entrepreneurs themselves.

Poverty as Distant History

Poverty exists because we built our theoretical framework on assumptions that underestimate human capacity. We designed concepts that are too confined (business, credit-worthiness, entrepreneurship, and employment) and developed institutions that remain half-finished, exclusionary, and inhibitive. Our present financial institutions are a prime example of establishments of our own creation that leave out the greater segment of our world population—the poor. However, I firmly believe that we can create a poverty-free world if we collectively believe and participate in it, rethinking our institutions and policies while building practices that expressly service the needs of the poor.

My experiences have given me unshakeable faith in human beings’ creativity. Humans are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty. We must create an enabling environment in which the poor can unleash their energy and creativity to make poverty a distant memory.