The Nobel committee’s choice to honor Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank with its Peace Prize Oct. 13 underscores the important but often ignored role of the private sector in efforts to eradicate poverty worldwide, according to three DePaul University professors who have researched the bank.

Patricia Werhane, DePaul’s Wicklander Chair in Business Ethics; Laura Hartman, a management professor; and Scott Kelley, a religious studies instructor at DePaul plan to turn their research into a book about the bank’s success in lifting millions from poverty through small loans that help poor people start businesses. “It is our thesis that poverty can be alleviated, if not eradicated, both locally and globally, but only if we change our narratives about global free enterprise and only if we rethink our mindsets regarding how poverty is most effectively ended,” Werhane said.

Hartman, a business ethics expert, said: “It has become both strategically propitious and morally imperative for global companies to develop successful approaches to poverty eradication. But this should not and cannot be achieved through continued charity or foreign aid. Rather, we have found that economic development strategies are most successful when assumed and engaged by the private sector. This is evidenced by Grameen Bank’s success in Bangladesh, where it has succeeded in helping more than two million families in rural communities to raise themselves out of poverty.”

Why should the private sector care? People lifted from poverty represent a huge, new market and allowing poverty to remain has a negative worldwide impact on business in today’s global economy, the professors argue. Additionally, for-profit business models, such as the Grameen Bank, are replicable, and replication will serve to reduce levels of poverty on a global scale.

Hartman said the Nobel Prize is significant because it may spark replication of the program, perpetuating “not just the spirit of Mr. Yunus’ efforts but the consequences of those efforts for generations to come.”

Media Contact: To interview Hartman, Werhane or Kelley, call Robin Florzak, DePaul Media Relations, at 312/362-8592 or 312/305-8592.