Winbolt: In retrospect you make all this sound very simple, but it must have been incredibly difficult at a social level to have these ideas accepted.

Yunus: Well, I was kind of swimming against the current. It was not easy; whatever you do, it raises tensions in society and in the communities. When we started giving loans to women, the banking system opposed us, men opposed us, even the husbands. On top of that, the woman who was getting the loan was not even in favour at first, because she knew her husband would feel insulted if she got the money.

Winbolt: How does one overcome that?

Yunus: We have gone through a lot of different steps to see how not to pull the man down in this way. We felt sudden change might bring a high level of tension to the families and that the woman would become the recipient of that tension. One way we guarded against that was by going through long sessions of discussions before we gave a loan to a group member. We would ask, "What will be the reaction of your husband if you bring the money home? And what will be your strategy to protect the marriage when you receive the money?" We also did role-play. One of the women would become the husband and another woman the wife who had just got the loan. She would bring the money home and the woman who was playing the role of the husband would raise questions and make demands, such as "Give me the money".

Winbolt: So you were playing a highly therapeutic role from the very beginning in fact. You were anticipating possible failures and assisting the participants in preparing for what might go wrong.

Yunus: Well, I don't know what role it was but we thought at that time that it had to be done that way because, otherwise, if we left things as they were, very soon she would be beaten up.

Yunus: Most definitely. The poor in any culture need financial resources. Wherever you live, when you can finance your own activities, you start to break out of the poverty cycle. This is particularly true for women who cannot get jobs for social reasons.

Winbolt: That brings me to the sixteen decisions that you get people to sign up in Bangladesh; looking at the list, it is quite astonishing to find that people accept these, on top of all the other implications we have talked about. One would think that the changes required of them to become entrepreneurs would be quite enough to take on, without having to abide by a set of rules that amount to a charter for changing society.

Yunus: Absolutely, yes. But those decisions were not imposed by the bank and I am not their author. It was the members who, through a long and laborious process, developed these decisions. You see, once you achieve something, you are ready to achieve more. You want more achievement for yourself. When you start seeing things you never saw before, then you want to address those things. Initially, you are only worried about finding food, not worried about any other thing. But, once the food problem has been resolved, then you start looking at your house, and you start looking at your neighbours; you start looking at your children. So this is what happens; one thing leads to another.

Yunus: By getting unhooked from the element of collateral. As long as the banking world is hooked to the collateral, so the basic principle becomes - the more you have, the more you can get. So you become more and more powerful. It becomes easier for you to have more power if you already have some power. And the reverse is true. If you don't have any power to start with, you don't get to have any power at all. If there's nothing, you get nothing.

Winbolt: So in order to break the cycle it requires someone, the Grameen Bank or somebody else, to step in and say, "Look, I have faith here. I am going to give these people credit where others have not". And that, of course, has a double meaning. You are also giving credit to the poor in the sense that you are believing they will repay their debts.

Yunus: Someone has to say, "I'll try it," without first demanding the guarantee that it will work.

Winbolt: In those areas where Grameen is active, does the relationship with the people you lend money to, end one day? Do they eventually create their own independence and then you move on to new people, or is it a lifelong relationship?

Yunus: Even if there are some who say that, having been helped, they don't want to borrow any more, they still have great loyalty to Grameen, so they bank with us in the normal way. This is what gave them their life. One of our earliest members, who had been sick for a long time, said her last wish was that she could die at her local Grameen centre. To her it was such an important thing, because our project helped her become something.

Winbolt: Would you say, once Grameen has become active in a village, these changes are enduring because they are promoted from the bottom up, as it were?

Yunus: Very much so. It is not a true parallel but one might almost say it is a university which you graduate from. You always want to go back and be a part of it all the time because this is where you were born. So Grameen Bank is where many people are born and where they find their own life.

Winbolt: Do you think there are any individuals or groups who cannot be helped in this way?

Yunus: I don't think so. A lot of people raise that question and my answer is that the only obstacle is our ability to tailor our approach to the individual. I feel that, if someone cannot do something, it is because they didn't know how or because of fear. So it is a question of our ability to introduce ideas or design things for that person. It is not the person's problem. It is the problem of the initiator of the programme. If someone refuses to be helped in this way, then we have not yet offered them the right design.