Ideas for change: social business

Adidas shoes for less than one euro? Muhammad Yunus re-imagined our social future and helped make it happen. Yunus argues that too many businesses are focused exclusively on financial profits.

For a new world to emerge, Yunus believes we need a new structure: creating social businesses to solve social problems.

A social business is financially sustainable but does not pay dividends; instead, any profits stay within the business to fund future activities. Its focus is solving social problems, such as providing employment or addressing health and educational issues. Yunus concludes that there is no invisible hand; it is up to us to re-imagine and create the social structure we need.

Watch the full 14 minute version of the video here:

Authror:s Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize and Managing Director of the Grameen Bank since 1985, is widely recognized as the originator of the use of microcredit as a powerful tool in the fight against poverty and inequality. The Bangladesh-born Fulbright Fellow has a vision of the global eradication of poverty. “Grameen is a message of hope, a programme for putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long”, he said.