Nobel award gives impetus to poverty battle

Nobel peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh said yesterday his selection for the award gives fresh impetus to the war on poverty around the world and new responsibilities for him.

Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for grassroots efforts to lift millions out of poverty that earned him the nickname "banker to the poor".

In a country born in 1971 after a war of independence and with much of its history strewn with coups and natural disasters, some hoped the Nobel Peace Prize - the first in any category for a Bangladeshi - would help usher in a less troubled future.

Yunus told a packed news conference in Dhaka his mission would be to make Bangladesh poverty-free.

Yunus said he planned to use the Nobel award money to set up eye hospitals for the poor.

Yunus, 66, set up a new kind of bank in 1976 to lend to the very poorest in his native Bangladesh, particularly women, enabling them to start up small businesses without collateral.

In doing so, he pioneered micro-credit, a system copied in more than 100 nations from the United States to Uganda.

Grameen Bank beneficiaries celebrated Yunus' award by singing and dancing to the beat of drums.

The bank, which has turned a profit in all but three years, lends to 6.6 million people, 96 per cent of them women, and has not received donor funds in eight years. It counts beggars among its members, giving them interest-free loans and life insurance.