Muhammad Yunus: Creating a Poverty-Free World

Preview of Muhammad Yunus: Creating a Poverty-Free World. Dr. Yunus, who was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, offers his insights into what is required to eradicate global poverty. Yunus envisions a new kind of capitalism, and demonstrates how his organizations, the Grameen Bank and the Grameen Family of Companies, offer viable solutions to the challenge of pervasive poverty.

A Dollar A Day

"Living on less than a dollar a day" is a familiar phrase, but what does it really mean? Mike Wooldridge uncovers the brutal hardships facing the world's poor.

Almost half the people of the world live on less than US$1 a day - yet even this statistic fails to capture the humiliation, powerlessness and brutal hardship that is the daily lot of the world's poor.

BBC’s Mike Wooldridge asks whether the global target of halving world poverty by 2015 can really be achieved, reporting personal stories from around the world that vividly illustrate what it's really like to have to live on a dollar a day and how it can mean different things in different countries.

Part 1: Kenya
In Kenya, Isaiah and his family live on the few crops they can grow on their small plot of land and the US$7-10 a month he makes from growing tea. He has debts to pay to the tea company for the fertiliser he needs and the family can only live a day at a time. In contrast, their neighbours make about US$2 a day growing and selling maize, mending bicycles and making bricks. They have plans for the future, but find that pressures on the land due to a growing population mean that things are much harder today than they were 20 years ago.

Part 2: Peru
Ayacucho in the Andes is one of the poorest areas of Peru. Gerarda Castro Ramirez, who fled to the city following the conflict between the Shining Path Movement (Sendero Luminoso) and the government in the 1980s and 1990s, now lives with her ten children in searing poverty. Mike reports on a new government programme which attempts to help the poor by giving women the equivalent of a dollar a day in cash in return for sending their children to school and getting them vaccinated.

Part 3: India
Veeran is a spirited 75-year-old living alone in the back streets of the town of Rohtak, north-west of Delhi. In her small, spartan home she symbolises one of India's newest challenges. More and more people are surviving into their seventies and beyond, thanks to overall improvements in health care, but there is a growing problem of destitution among the elderly too. Mike hears at first-hand how elderly people cope and how they view the changes taking place around them. Younger people who neglect their relatives could end up before tribunals - but is this what the elderly themselves want? The policy issues involved are crucial. It is predicted that by the middle of the century Asia will be home to almost two-thirds of the world's older people

Part 4: Ghana
At 15, Dzifa Adjanu said she wanted to become an accountant so that she "wouldn't get cheated in life". Fifteen years on, this determined young Ghanaian has achieved her ambition, although it has been an enormous struggle for her family to find the money to complete her education. Education, and in particular girls' education, is one of the Millennium Development goals for halving global poverty by the year 2015, and Ghana is one of the few African countries on track to meet the target of getting more girls into school but the challenges are still enormous. Mike accompanies Dzifa as she returns to her old school, and meets her mother Margaret, who sacrificed so much to get her through - along with other girls who have not been so fortunate.