Who is Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s new transitional leader?

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Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus will take the lead role in guiding Bangladesh through its new transitory period, after mass student-led protests pushed the nation’s longtime prime minister to resign and flee abroad earlier this week.

Born in the seaport city of Chittagong in 1940, Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for pioneering the idea of microcredit. In the wake of the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, the students behind the catalyzing demonstrations wanted Yunus to take the reins, and after a six-hour meeting on Tuesday between those students and the Bangladeshi president and security chiefs, the country’s top officials agreed to allow Yunus to head the country’s interim government until new special elections are held.

Here’s what to know about the new transitional leader of this South Asian country, home to 171 million people.

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What won Yunus the Nobel Prize?

Yunus received his bachelor’s degree in economics at Dhaka University in 1960, then his master’s in 1961, and ultimately traveled to Nashville to earn his PhD in the same field from Vanderbilt University in 1971. He was a strong advocate for Bangladeshi independence in the country’s 1971 war with Pakistan and tried to rally diasporic support from the United States.

Yunus was teaching economics at Chittagong University in the south of the country when famine struck Bangladesh in 1974. Low-income villagers in the nearby town of Jobra took out loans from local lenders who charged exorbitantly high interest rates, and some were driven to slave labor to pay back their debts.

Yunus, in a 2016 interview with the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, described a woman from Jobra named Sophia who left a particularly strong impact on him. “She was a bamboo stool maker and she was borrowing money from the trader because she didn’t have money to buy the bamboo, which goes into the bamboo stool,” Yunus said. “It’s a horrible story. The trader takes all the profit and she doesn’t get anything, but she does all the work.”

But what if, instead of relying on local lenders who charged exorbitant interest rates, women like Sophia could receive and pay back a small loan, or “microloan?” Thus was born the concept of microcredit.

In 1983, Yunus founded Grameen Bank – in Bengali, “Village” Bank – to extend very small sums of money to poor people, especially women, who had no collateral and would therefore not otherwise be eligible. His banking system relied on an intricate local network of trust and relationships that encouraged people to pay each other back, with no attempt to cheat or outsmart anyone. Yunus went on to title his 1999 autobiography “Banker to the Poor.”

Since Yunus first developed the concept of microloans and microfinance more than 30 years ago, the banking tactic has gained widespread popularity, particularly in the context of programs aimed at lifting poor and rural women out of poverty.

By the time he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, more than 7 million borrowers had received microloans, which the Nobel website describes as “small long-term loans on easy terms.” More than 95 percent of Grameen Bank’s loans had gone to women or groups of women. When Yunus first founded Grameen, women made up just 1 percent of bank membership nationwide.

“We found that compared to men who spent money more freely, women benefited their families much more,” Yunus told Time Magazine in 2006. “Women wanted to save and invest and create assets, unlike men who wanted to enjoy right away. Women are more self-sacrificing, they want to see their children better fed, better dressed and, as a result, the conditions of the entire community improved.”

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When did Yunus’s relationship with the former prime minister sour?

The pair’s rocky relationship began soon after Yunus announced in 2007 that he was interested in entering politics. In 2008, the Hasina administration launched investigations into the recent Nobel laureate. She accused him of using force to mandate poor, rural women who had borrowed from Grameen to pay the bank back.

In 2011, the Hasina government began reviewing Grameen Bank’s activities and removed Yunus as head of his organization, arguing that he, then 73, had remained in his post beyond the legal retirement age of 60, Reuters reported. In January, Yunus was sentenced to six months in prison for allegedly violating labor law. Six months later, he and more than a dozen others were also indicted by a Bangladeshi court for allegedly embezzling from the workers’ welfare fund of a Yunus-founded telecommunications company.

Under Hasina’s tenure, Yunus faced more than 100 lawsuits on the basis of money laundering, labor law violations and subversion of retirement law, among other allegations. Yunus has vehemently denied all such claims and told The Washington Post on Monday that he expected the “fake cases” to be dropped following Hasina’s ouster.

“We’re all rejoicing – the monster who is on top of us has left. Today we are free,” Yunus told The Post. “A new force has emerged: the young people.”

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Why did the student protesters want Yunus in charge?

Before Hasina fled on Monday, Bangladesh had been rocked by weeks of protests over a quota system that reserved a portion of government jobs for families of those who fought for the country’s independence in 1971. The demonstrations and the police response to them proved deadly, with more than 250 people killed in the clashes.

Yunus was famously at odds with Hasina for much of the 21st century. As the student activists vehemently protested Hasina’s rule, perhaps it logically follows that they would nominate one of the former prime minister’s fiercest political opponents.

In a televised address on Monday, Bangladeshi army chief Gen. Waker-Uz-Zaman announced Hasina’s resignation and said that an interim government would be assembled in the days ahead. On Tuesday, the students who led the protests met with Bangladesh’s president and security chiefs after nominating Yunus as their pick to be the country’s transitional leader. Six hours later, the group reached agreement.