The recent announcement of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize going to Navi Pillay from South Africa stirred up two-decade-old memories for many of us with a strong connection to Bangladesh. This year, Ms. Pillay had been identified by oddsmakers as one of the likely recipients. But in 2006, none of those favored for the prize received it. In a big surprise, Professor Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank shared it, marking the first time a Bangladeshi had become a Nobel laureate. 

My friend, the late Muhammad Abdul Mannan Talukdar, was a Grameen Bank officer at the time in Faridpur district. Upon hearing the news, he rented a rickshaw, microphone, and speaker, and began plying the roads of his neighborhood announcing the good news in a typically Bangladeshi manner. 

Professor Yunus' friends abroad had hoped that he would one day win a Nobel Prize, either for peace or economics. We figured, wrongly as it turned out, that such recognition would insulate him from any kind of political persecution or harassment. But when he was passed over for the prize in 2005, the United Nations International Year of Microcredit, we figured that his best and last chance had passed. 

A few weeks after the surprise announcement in 2006, a conference organized by the Microcredit Summit Campaign was held in Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. Along with celebrating the achievement of the goal of reaching 100 million of the world's poorest families with microloans, which had been set in 1997, virtually all of the delegates congratulated Professor Yunus on his award. The mood of that convening, where more than 1,000 delegates gathered for three days, was joyful. That atmosphere continued up through the Nobel ceremony in Oslo in early December. 

Interest in Grameen Bank, Professor Yunus and his ideas about social business, and microcredit grew exponentially. But this recognition also provided extra motivation to critics. A growing number of journalists, documentarians, researchers, anti-globalization forces, and populist politicians set out to find flaws in the microcredit model and in the man who had made it so popular around the world.

Before that opposition coalesced in 2010, a tsunami of new support and attention had time to gather. Grameen America, a hugely successful adaptation of the Grameen model in the United States, was launched in 2007. (Today it provides $2 billion in loans to low-income Americans every year, and enjoys a 99% repayment rate. Its positive impact on its clients has been documented by external researchers.) New social businesses, such as the Grameen Eye Hospitals and the Grameen Caledonian College of Nursing, were launched. 

Things turned upside down in 2010, when Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina began what would become a 14-year campaign of harassment and persecution against Professor Yunus, his reputation, and the institutions he had created. Opposition to this campaign took a while to come together, especially in the increasingly authoritarian environment of Bangladesh; it was led by the courageous Grameen board members who were elected to the bank's board of directors. International allies worked to put pressure on the Bangladesh government to respect Professor Yunus' human rights and to treat the organizations he had created justly. In 2017, they formalized their work and created the Protect Yunus Campaign. 

To many who had hoped the Nobel Prize would form a protective shield around Professor Yunus came to realize that it had instead made him a target, especially in his home country where the rule of law was unraveling under Hasina. But she overplayed her hand, and a student-led uprising in 2024 led to her ouster and the appointment of Professor Yunus as the Chief Adviser leading the interim government of Bangladesh for 18 months. In solidarity with the Bangladeshi people and this historical opportunity, the Protect Yunus Campaign transformed itself into Friends of Bangladesh. 

At this point, I approached University Press Limited to publish an English-language version of my book Small Loans, Big Dreams—which told the stories of Grameen, Yunus, and how his model was adapted in America— for the Bangladeshi market. They agreed. When the response to that edition was favorable, we commissioned a Bengali translation that was released in June 2025. Both books included updates covering the years of persecution that spanned from 2010 to 2024 and the early months of the Interim Government. 

Despite the lack of cooperation from most of the institutions and political parties in the country, the Interim Government accomplished a lot. It stabilized the nation, including its financial sector, which had been on the verge of collapse. Foreign relations were recast with the needs and aspirations of the country, rather than a single individual or party, at the center. A new model of leadership emerged; many Bangladeshis appreciated being led by a pragmatic intellectual focused on the future rather than by an ideological strongman (or woman) obsessed with the past. 

Most importantly, the Interim Government organized one of the freest, fairest, and most celebratory elections in that nation's history, and then handed over power without regret or hesitation—marking yet another powerful break with the past. 

Twenty years on from the Nobel Prize announcement, Professor Yunus' once radical ideas about banking, business, and economics are becoming increasingly mainstream. He has also forcefully spoken out about climate change and war, and in so doing influenced a new generation of leaders. At the same time, he has gracefully transitioned back to the life of a private Bangladeshi citizen with global influence. 

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Alex Counts was a Fulbright Scholar in Bangladesh in 1988-89, the founder of Grameen Foundation USA, and the author of three books, including Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind: Leadership Lessons from Three Decades of Social Entrepreneurship (Revised Edition) and Small Loans, Big Dreams: Muhammad Yunus, the Grameen Bank, and the Global Microfinance Revolution. 

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