Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus was sworn in as the head of Bangladesh’s interim government on August 8 just three days after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was forced to resign.
Yunus, 84 who has a PhD in Economics won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work as founder of the Grameen Bank where he used microcredit to fight poverty.
Hasina who had been in power for 15 years resigned and fled to India after weeks of student-led protests against a government job quota system that favored the children of war veterans.
The students demanded that Professor Yunus lead the interim government fearing that the military would take over.
Yunus’s official title is Chief Adviser to the interim government, he was sworn in by President Mohammed Shahabuddin at the palace in Dhaka along with members of the new cabinet.
Muhammad Yunus a short biography
- Born on 28 June 1940 in Bathua
- Yunus’s father Haji Muhammad Dula Mia Soudagar, a jeweller, and his mother was Sufia Khatun
- He graduated with a BA in Economics (1960) and an MA in Economics (1961) from Dhaka University
- Yunus joined the Bureau of Economics as a research assistant and later
- He became a lecturer in Economics at Chittagong College in 1961
- Yunus graduated with a PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University in 1971 after receiving a Fulbright scholarship
- He was an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennesse State University from 1969 to 1972
- Yunus rad the Bangladesh Information Center and published the Bangladesh Newsletter to support the liberation war in the 1970s
- He was appointed to the Bangladesh Planning Commission headed by Nurul Islam after the war
- Yunus resigned from his government job and headed the Economics department at Chittagong University
