Muhammad Yunus was born in 1940 in Bangladesh and received an MA in Economics from Dhaka University. He went on to broaden his knowledge in the United States as a Fullbright and Eisenhower Fellow, earning his PhD from Vanderbilt University. Professor of Economics at Chittagong College, he founded the Bank of the Poor (the Grameen Bank) in 1976, a non-profit institution that has rescued hundreds of thousands of his countrymen from misery. He is considered to be the architect of the microcredit revolution. His bank only concedes credits to the very poor who then become shareholders in the entity; their number now exceeds 2.5 million, with 94 percent being women. Currently, it has more than 22,000 employees who work in nearly 38,000 of the country´s 68,000 hamlets and villages, and it has more than a thousand branch offices. The average loan is 75 dollars and the maximum is 300 dollars; there is a 98 percent repayment rate. The Bank goes out to look for clients and encourages self-employment; it uses a system that is now functioning in more than 50 countries to organise clients into small self-policing groups. In the words of Yunus, the system attempts "to do away with financial apartheid. We believe that a loan is more than a business proposition and that it, like sustenance, is a right of man". "Poverty has a place in museums, but not in a civilised human society". Yunus has received honorary doctorates from more than ten universities from around the world and is the recipient of such awards as the Ramón Masagay (Philippines), the Aga Khan for Architecture (Switzerland), the Pfeffer Peace Prize, awards from the World Food Foundation and the Gleitsman Foundation (all three in the United States), the Simón Bolivar (Unesco), the Man of Peace (Italy), etc.