The University of Murcia will launch next year the Yunus Center for Social Entrepreneurship thanks to an agreement signed last Saturday with Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2006 and promoter of social enterprises around the world.
The signing of the agreement took place this Saturday at a ceremony attended by Yunus himself and, on behalf of the UMU, the Vice Chancellor for Employment, Entrepreneurship and Society, Alicia Rubio;
and the Vice Rector for Social Responsibility and Transparency, Longinos Marín.
The agreement for the creation of the Yunus Center was signed at the Palacio de la Magdalena in Santander, hours before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Doctor Honoris Causa by the Menéndez Pelayo International University.
With the start-up of the Yunus Center for Social Entrepreneurship, the University of Murcia will disseminate among its students the concept of social enterprise and the importance of creating businesses that escape the logic of the market and whose main objective is to satisfy social needs and make a difference.
At present, only the Yunus Social Business Center of Catalonia exists in Spain, which means that the University of Murcia is a pioneer in the promotion of the social economy.
The University of Cantabria has also taken advantage of the visit of the Nobel prize to Santander to be accredited as the Yunus Center.
Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976;
an entity for the granting of microloans without guarantees to people without resources in rural areas.
This effort to encourage social and economic development from below earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
Since receiving this recognition, the worldwide interest in social entrepreneurship and, specifically, in the work done by Muhammad Yunus, has been increasing.
In order to respond to this interest, in 2008 the Yunus Center was created, an organization that spreads the philosophy of the social economy around the world and that is a tool for the achievement of Grameen Bank's objectives at a global level.
Source: Universidad de Murcia