Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Bangladeshi Economist, Grameen Bank Win Nobel Peace Prize, 10/16/06
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec06/peaceprize_10-16.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What is the Nobel Peace Prize?

2. What contributes to world peace?

3. Who is working toward world peace? How?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. Who won this year's Nobel Peace Prize?

Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, who developed a system of micro-credit loans for the poor, won the Nobel Peace Prize last week along with his Grameen Bank.

2. When giving the award, what did the Nobel committee have to say about the work the winners were doing?

In awarding the prize to Yunus and his Grameen Bank, the Norwegian Nobel committee said that peace and poverty cannot coexist.

"Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means," Ole Danbolt Mjoes, director of the Nobel committee, said when announcing the prize.

"Development from below serves to advance democracy and human rights," he added.

3. How did Yunus come to create his bank?

Yunus founded the Grameen Bank, which means "Rural or Village Bank" in the Bengali language, in 1976.

The idea came when he lent $27 to a small group of village women because they could not get the money on their own.

He realized that small loans to the poorest people could make a big difference in his rural south Asian nation Bangladesh.

"Their poverty was not a personal problem due to laziness or lack of intelligence, but a structural one: lack of capital," Yunus said in 1996, The Washington Post reported.

4. What is life like for many in Bangladesh?

Half of the 147 million people in Bangladesh live below the poverty line.

The economy is primarily agricultural and more than one-third of the population lives on less than $1 a day, according to the World Bank.

5. What is micro-credit?

Micro-credit loans are mostly given to poor people shut out of traditional banks and loan systems.

Without having to put up collateral -- something of value to guarantee the payment of the loan -- groups of borrowers are given small sums of money, averaging about $200.

The funds are used to buy such things as a cow, a few chickens or a cell phone, to start new businesses.

6. Describe how one business owner's life changed when she was given a micro-credit loan.

Dilwara Begum used her money from Grameen to buy a cow. Eventually with a second loan she was able to expand her business into a poultry barn that sells 7,000 eggs a week.

Her life has changed dramatically.

"In the past, we used to eat nothing more than rice and some vegetables. Today in each meal there is egg, meat, or fish -- at least one of them. Also, in the past we used to grow enough rice for about six months of the year; the rest we had to buy. Sometimes we had to borrow money to buy the rice. Today we grow enough rice for the whole year," Dilwara Begum told the NewsHour in 2001.

The lives of her children changed, too.

Although Begum and her husband, Nazim Uddin, have only four years of formal education between them, their son and daughter will both go to college.

7. Why does Yunus think dealing with women is essential to making real change in Bangladeshi society?

Over 96 percent of Grameen's borrowers are women. Many are illiterate.

Yunus has said that dealing directly with women is critical to making real change in rural society.

"Women are very cautious with the use of the money, but the men were impatient; they wanted to enjoy it right away. They will entertain friends, they will go to the movies, they will do whatever they could to enjoy for themselves personally. But women didn't look at it personally," he told the NewsHour.

"Women looked at it for the children, for the family and so on, and for the future."

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. According to the Nobel committee, peace and poverty cannot coexist. Do you agree? Why or why not? Explain your reasoning giving clear examples.

2. Muhammad Yunus, the winner of this year's Nobel Peace prize said in an interview that the people of Bangladesh were not poor because they were lazy or unintelligent but because they lacked capital. Do you agree? Why or why not? Is it possible to be smart and hard working and still be poor?

3. What do you think about Yunus' belief that women are essential to making real change in rural Bangladesh? How does this make you feel about being a young man or a young woman? Why do you think Yunus holds this belief? On what is he basing his facts?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org]. Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.