Here's a BBC article profiling Muhammad Yunus, an innovative thinker and man of action whose revolutionary ideas are helping the poor raise themselves out of poverty.

Muhammad Yunus is often referred to as "the world's banker to the poor". His life's work has been to prove that the poor are credit-worthy.

His revolutionary Grameen (Village) banking system is estimated to have extended credit to more than seven million of the world's poor, most of them in Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations in the world.

The vast majority of the beneficiaries are women.

Mr Yunus came up with the idea in 1976 while professor of economics at Chittagong University in southern Bangladesh.

The first loans he issued had a value of $27 (£14.50). Their recipients were 42 women from the village of Jobra, near the university.

The women had relied until then on local money-lenders who charged high interest rates. The conventional banking system had been reluctant to give credit to those who were too poor to provide any form of guarantee.

The success of Mr Yunus' scheme exceeded all expectations and has been copied in developing countries around the world.

His "micro-finance" initiative reaches out to people shunned by conventional banking systems - people so poor they have no collateral to guarantee a loan, should they be unable to repay it.

Mr Yunus' has tried to tranform the vicious circle of "low-income, low saving and low investment" into a virtuous circle of "low income, injection of credit, investment, more income, more savings, more investment, more income".

As a result, even beggars have been able to borrow money under his scheme.

Read the rest of article at BBC.com