Nobel for micro credit

The selection of Muhammad Yunus as this year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize puts a long-overdue stamp of international recognition on a century-old global movement to fight poverty by making credit available to very poor people to let them trade and barter their way up the economic ladder with dignity.

Over the past three decades, Yunus, a university economist, accomplished the seemingly impossible in his native Bangladesh by organizing very poor villagers into five-member credit circles and extending microcredit - creative loans of less than $309 on average - to do things like build a house, get a fishing boat, buy farm tools or pay for goods sold door to door.

There's no collateral behind the loans: personal ties between circle members creates pressure to repay loans.

Yunus' organization, the Grameen Bank (Grameen means "village" in Bengali) has loaned more than $5.7 billion to more than 6 million poor people - 97% of them women - and inspired similar projects around the world.