Nafis Sadik Award to Professor Yunus

In November 2014, Professor Mohammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate of 2006 for his invention of micro-credits, was invited to Berlin. He was honored with a ceremony in the Allianzforum on November 11th.  Robert Zinser, CEO of Rotarian Action Group for Population and Development (RFPD), had the opportunity to award him with the “Nafis Sadik Award for Courage“ for his great merits in women's empowerment. The Nafis Sadik Award was founded by RFPD years ago to honor personalities working for RFPD concerns. The prize was named after Nafis Sadik who lead the World Population Conference in Kairo 1994 and for many years was the Executive Director of UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund).

The concept of micro-credits became known all over the world and was copied many times. Unfortunately, due to lack of regulation, numerous dubious forms of micro-credits evolved, where powerful actors misused micro-credits to prey on the poor. As a result, many studies came up that evaluated micro-credits undifferentiatedly as negative. This endangeres the usability of instruments that have substantial potential to help to overcome poverty.

In collaboration with partners, the Research Institute for Application-Oriented Knowledge Processing (FAW) in Ulm developed the study „ Microcredit – Addressing an Ongoing Debate“, contributing to an overdue differentiation between worldwide micro-credit concepts which differ from each other a lot. When presenting the study, Professor Franz Josef Radermacher received a lot of applause. You can find the complete study, an abstract of the content, the constellation of partners, the program of the event and a set of foils here: http://www.faw-neu-ulm.de/microcredit-%E2%80%93-addressing-ongoing-debate.

In an impressing speech about his work, Professor Yunus also thanked Franz Josef Radermacher, Director of FAW and Chairman of RFPD German Section. Professor Yunus had a close relationship with RFPD since 2000, when he received a high honoring from Rotary International at the Rotary Convention in Singapore. There, he got to know the work of RFPD, and at the RFPD annual assembly he enthralled the members with his lecture on family planning and micro-credits. He took part at the pilot project "Family Planning and Micro-credits In the Slums of Alexandria, Egypt“, a project initiated and supported by RFPD and implemented by Rotaracters. The project was priced the best Rotaract-project at the Rotaract Europe Conference (EuCo) years ago.