Do we like Muhammad Yunus?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A lifetime of poverty-fighting and a legal record that mostly collapsed, but rights groups criticised his government's crackdown on its opponents.
Muhammad Yunus is the economist who founded Grameen Bank in 1983, lending small, collateral-free sums to people no bank would touch. Its success inspired microfinance programs around the world, and he later won the Nobel Peace Prize. That is the origin story, and it's a good one.
Then came the feud with Sheikh Hasina. The AP reports her government began investigating him after she took power in 2008, with her anger dating to 2007, when he floated a political party and never followed through. Hasina called him a “bloodsucker” and accused him of coercive loan collection, which is her allegation. He was pushed out of Grameen in 2011 over alleged retirement-rule breaches, and his supporters say it was harassment, which the government denied.
The legal pile-up is the bit people quote. A Dhaka labour court sentenced him to six months in January 2024 over Grameen Telecom's labour practices, and he said they were “punished for a crime we did not commit”. The Labour Appellate Tribunal acquitted him on 7 August 2024, and the High Court scrapped six other cases that October. A separate embezzlement charge, alleged by the Anti-Corruption Commission, saw him bailed in March 2024 with his lawyer saying he was innocent. We found no final outcome in the pages we read.
On the harm test, we found nothing from him against LGBTQ+ people either way, which is a gap, not a pass. On women, his government set up a Women's Affairs Reform Commission, and thousands from the Islamist group Hefazat-e-Islam rallied against its proposals. The page we read doesn't say how his government responded. On climate, he told AFP at COP29 that it was “very humiliating” for poor nations to beg for money for a problem others caused.
The real stain is the crackdown. In May 2025 his government imposed a temporary ban on the Awami League, and the election commission stripped its registration. Human Rights Watch's Meenakshi Ganguly said “stripping supporters of opposition parties of their rights isn't a way forward.” The page we read carries no government reply, so judge it on that.
Nothing new on him lately, since the big news was in February. He stepped down on 16 February 2026 in a farewell broadcast, after an election won by Tarique Rahman's BNP alliance and a referendum that endorsed the July Charter reforms. Reports say clashes in the campaign killed five people. A week later he was back at the Yunus Centre.