As a proud American and son of India, I look with hope at the exciting possibilities surrounding professor Muhammad Yunus’s leadership of Bangladesh. Three days after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled the country on August 5, Yunus was sworn in as Bangladesh’s interim government head.
Yunus, whom I consider a friend and have known for decades, accepted that post at the insistence of the student leaders who were at the forefront of the student-led struggle.
I am an entrepreneurship zealot, a believer in the power of ideas, and passionate about sustainability and impact. I am in awe of what Yunus has accomplished in his life. I work to bring life-enhancing technology to the world through my investments. Yunus, through endless experimentation and tinkering, has developed a series of institutional success models for reducing poverty, improving health care and education outcomes, and combating climate change.
For example, in 1996, Yunus succeeded in putting cell phones in the hands of hundreds of thousands of poor women in rural villages in Bangladesh, allowing them to generate income as village cell phone ladies. I am passionate about protecting our environment. Yunus founded a company that, beginning in 1995, has installed 1.8 million solar home systems and 1 million clean cook stoves, again almost exclusively in rural Bangladesh.
That doesn’t even include the creation of Grameen Bank that has cumulatively made US$39 billion in small, mostly income-generating loans to more than 10 million poor women that became a model for similar efforts in India and many other countries.
But now, Yunus has turned his attention to a new challenge, leading the eighth largest country in the world by population, a nation of more than 170 million people. This is a country with about half the population of the United States all in a land mass equal to the U.S. state of Illinois.
There are people throughout Bangladesh and around the world who are batting for Yunus’s success. I am one of them. But there are others who want him and the interim government he leads to fail and are spreading false narratives about what is going on under his leadership. So I would like to share my perspectives about his values, his approach, and his early results.
In his first two months in office, he got the police to return to work, which improved the law and order situation, took tangible steps to protect minorities such as Hindus, worked to improve relations with India, suggested that the regional powers reinvigorate SAARC, and made progress on bringing stability to the banking and financial sectors in Bangladesh (which were in disarray when he took office).
He also represented Bangladesh effectively at the U.N. General Assembly, and had more than 50 productive meetings with global leaders while he was in New York.
In his work in this role, I have seen him applying the same values and approach that I have seen him use throughout his career: building a national consensus on key issues, experimenting to determine what works best, inspiring fellow citizens (especially youth) to get involved in practical and constructive ways, treating all people with respect regardless of their religion, gender, or ethnicity, and being pragmatic as well as energetic (despite being 84 years old).
But there are many challenges. Leading a government can be many times more difficult than running a suite of social businesses and nonprofits. People aligned with the prior government that lost power wants his efforts to fail. The party that has been out of power for years wants a quick return. But I believe Yunus is up to the job.
In September, I joined 198 global leaders including 92 Nobel laureates in a letter to the people of Bangladesh and people of goodwill around the world.
“We are excited to see Professor Yunus finally free to work for the uplift of the entire country, especially the most marginalisd, a calling he has pursued with great vigor and success across six decades (sic).”
His early successes in this role augur well for the future of Bangladesh, and a successful Bangladesh is more likely to be a strong ally of India than a failing one. We should all be rooting for Yunus to continuing making progress in this important interim role, because Bangladesh reaching its potential is in India’s best interest.
Vinod Khosla is a businessman and venture capitalist.
