Books Written by Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunus lent $27 of his own money to forty-two people in a Bangladeshi village in 1976, on the theory that even the poorest borrowers would repay small loans if the system was built around trust rather than collateral. That experiment became Grameen Bank, then a global microcredit movement, then a broader argument that business itself could be redesigned around solving problems instead of maximising profit. He calls this idea “social business,” and he has spent four decades writing about what it actually takes to build one. Below is his core body of books, in order.
By Lisanne Swart · 4 books · 1998–2017 · Updated July 2026
Where to start
His origin story, told firsthand
Banker to the Poor (1998) — how a $27 loan became a Nobel Peace Prize.
His most current, most ambitious argument
A World of Three Zeros (2017) — the fullest version of where he thinks the whole idea leads.
Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World PovertyStart here
Written with Alan Jolis, this is Yunus’s own account of how a devastating famine in Bangladesh in 1974 pushed him to leave academic economics and lend $27 out of his own pocket to forty-two villagers making bamboo furniture. That small experiment became Grameen Bank, built on the then-radical idea that the poorest borrowers, especially women, would reliably repay loans without collateral if the lending structure was built around mutual accountability rather than traditional banking security.
This is the foundational text and the natural starting point — part memoir, part argument, tracing the idea from a single village to a bank serving millions before the theory around it had fully caught up.
Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
Yunus expands beyond microcredit to introduce “social business” as a formal category: a company whose investors agree upfront to take no profit out of it, with any surplus reinvested into the mission itself. He argues that conventional capitalism, built entirely around profit maximisation, structurally cannot solve problems like poverty, and that a parallel business sector built around solving them is both necessary and commercially viable.
Read this once you understand what Grameen Bank was, to see how Yunus generalised a single successful bank into an argument about how business itself should work.
Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing NeedsMost practical
Where the previous book made the case for social business, this one is closer to a how-to guide, drawing on real joint ventures Grameen built with corporations including Danone, BASF, and Adidas to deliver affordable nutrition, health products, and footwear to poor communities. Yunus lays out the practical mechanics — funding, governance, measuring success without a profit metric — that a social business actually requires.
The most useful entry for readers who want to actually build something rather than be persuaded of the concept; it is closer to an operating manual than a manifesto.
A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions
Yunus’s most sweeping book, arguing that poverty, unemployment, and carbon emissions are not three separate crises but three symptoms of the same flawed economic architecture — one built entirely around self-interest with no room for people’s equally real drive to help others unselfishly. He sketches the financial and legal changes he believes are needed to let social business scale to the size of the problems it is meant to solve.
The fullest, most current statement of where four decades of Yunus’s thinking has arrived, connecting microcredit to climate and labour in a single framework.
Beyond the books
Yunus and Grameen Bank shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for demonstrating that credit is a basic human right rather than the privilege of the already-secure. In 2024, at age 84, he took on an entirely different role, becoming Chief Adviser of Bangladesh’s interim government following the country’s political upheaval — a late-career turn from writing about institutions to running one.
Frequently asked questions about Muhammad Yunus’s books
Muhammad Yunus speaking in person on his work with Grameen Bank and social business, recorded as part of a university Dean's Speaker Series — real footage of Yunus himself, not a recreation.
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“All human beings are entrepreneurs.” — Muhammad Yunus
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