Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country on Monday (Aug 5) following weeks of deadly protests.
They began as student-led demonstrations against government job quotas.
But they quickly surged into a movement demanding both Hasina’s resignation and that her arch rival, a Nobel Prize winner named Muhammad Yunus, helm an interim government.
Yunus has accepted the request, but what do we know about him?
“BANKER TO THE POOR”
Yunus has been called the “banker to the poor” and a pioneer of the global microcredit movement.
Microcredit lending is the idea of extending small loans to very poor people – often small business owners.
Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for helping lift millions from poverty by providing microloans to Bangladesh’s rural poor.
Their lending model has since inspired similar projects around the world and Yunus started Grameen America, focused on US women living in poverty, in 2008.
HASINA’S FOE
As his success grew Yunus flirted briefly with a political career and attempted to form his own party in 2007.
His ambitions were widely viewed as having sparked Hasina’s ire, who accused him of “sucking blood from the poor”.
His critics have also said his microlenders charge excessive rates and make money off the poor, but Yunus said the rates were far lower than local interest rates in developing countries.
Hasina’s government removed him as head of Grameen Bank in 2011, saying that at 73, he had stayed on past the legal retirement age of 60.
Thousands of Bangladeshis formed a human chain to protest his ouster.
