"Poverty is not Created by the Poor People",says Prof.Muhammad Yunus.He opines that "Poverty is not created by the poor people. So we shouldn't give them an accusing look. They are the victims. Poverty has been created by the economic and social system that we have designed for the world. It is the institutions that we have built, and feel so proud of, which created poverty. It is the concepts we developed to understand the reality around us, made us see things wrongly. They took us down a wrong path, and caused misery for people. It is our policies borne out of our reasonings and theoretical framework, with which we explain interactions among institutions and people, that caused this problem for so many human beings. It is the failure at the top - rather than lack of capability at the bottom - which is the root cause of poverty.He believes that we can can we really reduce extreme poverty by half by 2015."We can set ourselves on a course to eliminate poverty from the world for all time to come. We can get ready to put poverty in the museum, where it belongs. Each human being is too resourceful and intelligent to suffer the misery of poverty. Poverty and the human species just do not go together. But in reality it has happened because we created wrong mindsets which did not allow poor people to know their own potential. All we have to do is to remove the heavy crust that keeps their abilities unknown to them.
Enabling people to explore their full potential is an agenda we must take up seriously, to make sure our efforts to reach 2015 goal become a thumping success. This goal of halving the poverty must be achieved by 2015 ? if we pride ourselves to be sensible, sensitive and creative beings."reaffirms Prof.Yunus in his
Commonwealth Lecture,2003.
