At the Nobel Prize ceremony, you said poverty and injustice are threats to peace.
Is anyone surprised at the connection between microfinance and peace? People have been asking me for 15 years, “When are you going to win the Nobel Peace Prize?” on the premise that if you reduce poverty, you enhance peace. The position I take is that what threatens peace is some sense of injustice in people’s minds. Then they will resort to violence because they cannot address injustice by conventional means of democracy or negotiation. One form of violence is terrorism. “I’m poor for no reason, they have robbed me of everything, it is their fault.” Or, “Our next-door neighbor is a rich country, we are a poor country, they come and exploit us, so we resort to violence.” There is also political injustice. “My voice is not heard, my land has been conquered.” There is ethnic injustice, religious injustice. These are reasons that peace is disturbed. Poverty is one of those deprivations, so anyone who can reduce poverty could be enhancing peace. We’re setting a goal that 100 million of the poorest families get out of poverty by 2015.

But there is something else we have been seeing among the women who borrow money from Grameen Bank to start small businesses. They meet in groups to help each other with their businesses and to elect a chairperson and a secretary. When a woman is elected, she experiences power, often for the first time. She doesn’t like to give up that power. She knows now that she has to make decisions. These women have started contesting local governments. There are more than 3,000 Grameen women in local offices. This might be a woman who didn’t have the confidence to look you in the eye or talk to you before. Now she’s a public figure.

You have also said that access to credit should be a right.

The rights to food, shelter, education and healthcare are things that all humankind has come to accept as basic rights. But who is going to provide those rights? The state? The easier way to do it is to create an environment that makes it possible for individuals to establish their own human rights. But someone has to provide the facility for them to create income for themselves. In developing countries, no one has been there to provide capital except moneylenders. So we have established a financial system where everyone is entitled to go and borrow.

There are, however, microcredit institutions that charge interest rates as high as 30 percent, on a par with moneylenders.

You can add 10 percent above the cost of funding, and that should cover all of your risk. Sometimes you have to add another 5 percent, but above 15 percent you are basically imitating the moneylenders. Some people say those are high interest rates, meaning that the interest rate should be nominal. I disagree with that. You have to cover your costs, because otherwise you have a charitable business that cannot sustain itself.

Securitization of microfinance loans is one possible way to make more capital available.

Securitization within the country of operation, in the local currency, is a good option. I think we should gradually develop this facility with some kind of guarantee mechanism from willing partners abroad who can help securitize domestically with international support.

But, at the same time, this is a case where you need money from outside your organization. Our preferred strategy is to raise money from within a system instead of borrowing from someone else.