President opened a conference on "Challenges for social economy"
All that matters about economy, often forgotten, is improvement in societies' living standards, said President Bronislaw Komorowski while opening a conference on "Challenges for social economy" in Warsaw on Wednesday.
The conference was attended by Nobel Peace Prize winner Professor Muhammad Yunus, the founder of a system of microloans.
The president underlined that Yunus' system brought excellent results in southern Asia. (...) "Creating the opportunity for people to take responsibility for themselves and assistance in difficult beginnings is a problem of a number of countries, including Poland," the president explained and thanked the Nobel Prize winner for sharing his experience and knowledge.
In a short lecture Yunus stressed that the system of micro-credits had gained world-wide popularity.
In his opinion the current financial crisis should be conducive to a change in the system and approach to it. "Capitalism breeds an obsessive money coveting. Money becomes a value in itself while the true value is a man and not money," he stressed.
Yunus, currently an aide to the UN Secretary General, is the founder of the Grameen Bank offering cheap credit to the poor in his native Bangladesh. Today the Grameen Bank model has been copied worldwide. In 2006 Grameen Bank and Yunus were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. (PAP)