Question: You mentioned working with a nobel peace prize winner, who was it? and how did you come to work for him?

Ken Gibbs answered on 19 Mar 2012:

His name is Muhammed Yunus and he was Professor of Economics at Chittagong University. It was he who created the Grameen Bank which provides micro-credit to rural women. Check out his entry in Wikipedia.

I did not work for him. At the time that I was in Bangladesh, working for UNICEF (1980 to 1985), Prof Yunus was a frequent visitor to UNICEF and he would occasionally drop by the Water Section (of which I was head at the time), to pass the time of day. One day he arrived unannounced and because he was so charming, you always stopped what you were doing, and arranged a cup of tea. When he was settled, bare-foot, on the old sofa in my office, I asked what I could do for him ? Well, he said, I would very much like you to give me 5,000 handpumps for the Grameen Bank which I will use as a “revolving fund”. Women who are given a pump will repay the Bank in cash which will be used to buy more pumps.

While the idea was very interesting, I did not have 5,000 spare pumps, but I believed that I could hide 20 pumps from our auditors so the Professor could show how the system would work. He went away with 20 pumps. Nine months later, he arrived back with the history of those 20 pumps all of which had been fully repaid at full cost, from the vegetables grown using water from the pumps.

As I was just about to move to Pakistan by that time, I left before seeing how many pumps were allocated to the Grameen Bank – but I imagine quite a lot of them were.

Professor Yunus and the Grameen Bank jointly were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.