You have shaken up banks in poor countries by getting them to lend money to people with no collateral. Did you have to start with your own capital?

In 1976 I was in a Bangladeshi village where people were starving, trying to see how I could help. I put together a list of 42 people who needed just a little money, and because the banks wouldn’t lend to them, I lent them money. The total amount they borrowed was $27. I thought, “I can solve the problem, so why don’t I do it?”

But since I’m a teacher, and not a moneylender, I thought the bank would be the right solution. I went to the local banker, and he told me, “Banks cannot lend money to the poor people.” So after months of running around, I finally offered myself as a guarantor. Luckily it worked. We got approval to start a bank in 1983, so it took seven years.

I said that at least 50 percent of the borrowers must be women, because I was campaigning against the traditional banks that didn’t lend to the poor and didn’t lend to women. The women themselves would say, “No, not me, give it to my husband.” They had never touched money before in their lives. I started having sessions with village women. But husbands wanted to control the money, so we had to go through another round of training with the men. They might bully their wives, but in a group with a bank official, they were very submissive. Our rules are very clear: Your wife makes the money; it has to stay with her; it benefits you because she uses it for the whole family.

Who is funding Grameen’s forays into what you call  “social business”?

There is tension in the microcredit world, with one group seeing it as a business opportunity, the other as an opportunity to help the poor. We see something in between. Business as we know it now exists for the single purpose of profit maximization. I say that that is too narrow of an interpretation. It depicts human beings as money-making machines. In my mind, a human being is much, much more. If we could define business in a wider way, we could open the way for businesses that exist with other objectives. You run a business as a business; however, you start the company not for the purpose of making money, but to provide poor people with safe drinking water or healthcare.

Right now, Bangladesh has 1.6 million cataract patients waiting for surgery, but the total capacity of the entire country is under 100,000. We want to set up small cataract surgery centers. They will be good hospitals, and we will charge market rates to patients who can afford it. But for the very poor, we will charge $1 to have the operation performed by the same surgeon. If a hospital is profitable, then that money will go toward building another one. If anyone is willing to lend $600,000, we will build a hospital, operate it, make it self-sustaining and then return your money. Your name will go on the hospital. And if we have a surplus, we will build another one.

We have two such hospitals now. One of these hospitals is being financed through the Green Children Foundation of Norway; the capital came from a Norwegian businessman. He asked how much it would cost. We hadn’t worked out all the costs, and I underestimated that it would be $500,000. Later I sent him a letter and said we made a low estimate, but we could put in $100,000 ourselves. He said, “Why should I let you make up the rest, because it’s my hospital?”